MICROCOSMOS

A Bug's Life is the most readily-overlooked of Pixar films, and I'd be lying if I pretended that I couldn't figure out why. After a decade and a half of riches, the 1998 film (the studio's second feature) can't help but seem unduly modest in every aspect of its writing. The story is perfectly ordinary - it's yet another riff on the basic Seven Samurai model - the jokes are largely ordinary and a bit shticky, the characters go through the most expected possible journeys. But it is a greatly important film: it's where Pixar proved that it had something to it besides novelty, and that the enormous success of Toy Story in 1995 augured for a real lifespan for this whole fully-rendered computer animation thing. Indeed, A Bug's Life was only the third CGI animated feature made in America, and would have been second if Jeffery Katzenberg wasn't hellbent on beating it to theaters with the transparent knock-off Antz, the first of many "fuck you" Valentines he'd deliver to the Walt Disney Company with his new DreamWorks Animation.

It's not true, of course, that A Bug's Life was the gatekeeper that needed to succeed for any and all further Pixar films to exist; Toy Story 2 was already in production, after all. But A Bug's Life did prove that Pixar's creative trust had the chops to be more than just a Toy Story factory, and demonstrated the studio's commitment to constantly challenging itself. Technologically and stylistically, the transition from Toy Story to A Bug's Life is probably the single biggest leap in aesthetic quality made by any individual Pixar film: while the 1995 picture shows its age in every implausibly smooth wood surface and rigid piece of cloth (to say nothing of its hideous human characters), A Bug's Life still looks pretty great out of a few aberrations here and there, most notably the surface texture of some of its insect characters, and generally feels like the baseline from which all of Pixar's subsequent triumphs have developed, much more so than Toy Story does.

That said, the studio's films are at least as beloved for the high quality of their storytelling as for the beauty and complexity of their images, and this is where A Bug's Life simply can't hold pace with most of its successors, though this speaks more highly of Pixar's run of masterpieces from 2001-2010 than it diminishes A Bug's Life in any particular way. Born out of the legendary lunch meeting with Pixar's top heads pitching the ideas that would make up most of their output through 2008's WALL·E, A Bug's Life's story, credited to John Lasseter (who directs), Andrew Stanton (who co-directs), and Joe Ranft, centers on an ant colony on a small island in a dry riverbed, where we meet the standard-issue ambitious outcast with ideas too big for his hidebound community, Flik (Dave Foley), whose attempts to make life better for all have been hell on Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), currently in the last stages of taking control of the colony over from her aged mother (Phyllis Diller). When Flik's latest invention manages to destroy the entire food offering the ants have left for the tyrannical grasshopper leader Hopper (Kevin Spacey), Atta and the other ant leaders are more than happy to ship Flik off on a mission to find warrior bugs to defend the colony, hoping to keep him out ofthe way while they work double-time to accede to the grasshoppers' demands.

In the big city - a collection of boxes outside of a trailer - Flik finds no warriors, though he thinks he has: instead, the band of lost souls he stumbles across are the refugees from a crappy circus run by hapless P.T. Flea (John Ratzenberger, Pixar's good luck charm). These include angry male ladybug Francis (Denis Leary), sad sack walking stick Slim (David Hyde Pierce), upbeat black widow spider Rosie (Bonnie Hunt), hammy magician Manny the praying mantis (Jonathan Harris) and his assistant/wife Gypsy the moth (Madeline Kahn), hungry caterpillar Heimlich (Ranft), sweet rhinoceros beetle Dim (Brad Garrett), and incomprehensible pill bug twins Tuck and Roll (both voiced by Michael McShane). Under Flik's leadership, they concoct a plan to fight the grasshoppers, and all the beats you would expect turn up: Atta and the rest learn of the deception, Flik becomes a greater outcast than ever, Hopper doubles down on his demands, and eventually Flik is able to redeem himself by saving the day.

In the most abstract strokes, this is just about the commonest set of personal stakes a children's movie can adopt for itself. And make no mistake, A Bug's Life is a children's movie. Years of Pixar movies blurring the line between movies mostly for kids and families, versus movies that are kind of for adults but kids can enjoy them (and in the case of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, traipsing right over that line) have made it hard to remember that initially, they made no real claims to that kind of sophistication. And while I regret the implications of the word "unsophisticated" is exactly the adjective to describe A Bug's Life, from its paint-by-numbers character motivations to its easy and surprisingly lowbrow humor: there are more potty jokes here than in any other Pixar movie, though given how many of them contain no potty jokes at all, that's not a huge bar to clear.

All of that being the case, the film has the basic decency to be an extraordinarily good version of an undistinguished children's movie. The finished script, by Stanton and Don McEnery & Bob Shaw, is characterised by crisp dialogue and strong jokes, and the layers of callbacks and internal echoes give it a nice overall shape that strengthens Flik and Atta's arcs; the random asides that play on the reality that we're watching insects living like humans are generally cute rather than actively smart, but I cannot lie: I chuckled at things like a fly grousing "I've only got 24 hours to live and I'm not wasting them here" in '98 and I continue to do it in 2015. And the light humor is aided enormously by the cast, made up disproportionately of sitcom veterans (Richard Kind and Edie McClurg also show up), who thus have exactly the right skill set to make lines and scenarios that you can see coming from quite a distance still play with honesty and energy and feel like they're coming from the characters, not from the writing room.

And again, film looks pretty great, too. The filmmakers' fascination with a scaled-down world, what that means to lighting and texture, is the first great experiment in finding the realism in fantastic setting that makes Pixar's films the most physically authentic animated features in the world. Just the way that clover and blades of grass filter light is enough to make the film look truly marvelous and rich, and that's not even the most conspicuously beautiful lighting effect that the film has to offer. It's a bit baffling that this carefully researched and highly thoughtful attempt at making a realistic miniature world would be in service to such a weird misrepresentation of ant society. Even Antz, which is literally a movie about what would happen if Woody Allen was an ant, comes at least slightly closer to correctly representing how ants function, which for starters involves having six limbs and not coming in shades of blue and lavender. Not till Bee Movie nine years later would a film get insect society so palpably wrong as a basic condition of having a narrative.

But it is, in fairness, a cartoon riffing on the old "Grasshopper and the Ants" fable in a thoroughly unexpected way, so realism is probably the wrong complaint. And by creating a race of fantasy creatures that it calls ants for no reason, A Bug's Life (last nitpick: ants aren't bugs) succeeds in portraying simple situations with warm characters whose relationships, though they mostly come right off the shelf (the simple commoner charms the princess with his bravery? YOU DON'T SAY.), are treated with utter sincerity and a glancing touch. There's no question that this is near the bottom of Pixar's output, but it didn't know that it would be competing with those other films, and on its own terms, it's an entirely beguiling little adventure that advancing technology and a vastly different marketplace haven't robbed of its merits.

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NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

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