A Bug's Life

A Bug's Life is a 1998 American animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It is Pixar's second feature-length film, following Toy Story (1995). The film was directed by John Lasseter, co-directed by Andrew Stanton (in his feature directorial debut), and produced by Darla K. Anderson and Kevin Reher, from a screenplay written by Stanton, Donald McEnery, and Bob Shaw, and a story conceived by Lasseter, Stanton, and Joe Ranft. It stars the voices of Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Hayden Panettiere, Phyllis Diller, Denis Leary, David Hyde Pierce, Joe Ranft, Jonathan Harris, Madeline Kahn, Bonnie Hunt, Brad Garrett, Michael McShane, John Ratzenberger and Richard Kind. In the film, a misfit ant named Flik, looks for "tough warriors" to save his ant colony from a protection racket run by a gang of grasshoppers. However, the "warriors" he brings back turn out to be an inept troupe of Circus Bugs. The film's plot was initially inspired by Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper.

Production on A Bug's Life began shortly after the release of Toy Story in 1995. The ants in the film were redesigned to be more appealing, and Pixar's animation unit employed technical innovations in computer animation. Randy Newman composed the music for the film. During production, a controversial public feud erupted between Steve Jobs and Lasseter of Pixar and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg due to the parallel production of his similar film Antz, which was released the same year.

A Bug's Life premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on November 14, 1998, and was released in the United States on November 25. It received positive reviews and became a commercial success, having grossed $363 million at the box office. It was the first film to be digitally transferred frame-by-frame and released on DVD, and has been released multiple times on home video.