In the words of Steve Jobs, "At Pixar, we're really clear that all this amazing technology that we've invented is really in the service of storytelling. Storytelling is what we're really about. We're just doing it in this amazing new medium of computer animation. We view it as giving the storytellers a bigger palette from which they can create these incredible worlds.

Synopsis

Using the classic Aesop's fable about the carefree grasshopper who comes begging for food from a colony of industrious ants as a point of departure, the creative team has given the traditional tale a wildly imaginative and irreverent new spin.

Life is no picnic for the ants on Ant Island! Each summer, a gang of greedy grasshoppers - led by the menacing and manipulative Hopper - descend upon the colony to demand a hefty portion of the ants' hard-earned harvest and generally make life miserable for this peaceful community.

Behind the scenes with the team

According to Lasseter, "Insects are a perfect match for the computer because of their ecoskeleton, the beautiful iridescence of their shells and the transparency of their wings. And when you get down low and you look at the world as they see it, the leaves and blades of grass are translucent. It's like they live in a world with stained glass all around them. That's the kind of look we wanted to get into this film."

From its inception, the filmmakers envisioned "A Bug's Life" as a David Lean-style epic adventure that unfolds in a vast natural setting. From a bug's perspective, blades of grass would appear to be a forest of tall trees; a tree would appear to be Mount Everest; microscopic areas would appear as endless panoramas. The decision was made to produce the film in a wide-screen CinemaScope format to emphasize, exaggerate and have fun with these elements of size and scale.

A tremendous amount of research went into bug anatomy, locomotion and behavior, examining excellent documentaries such as "Microcosmos" and National Geographic specials, which gave the team a close-up look at the world of bugs.

Furthermore Lasseter suggested that it might be helpful to have a better sense of what the world might look like from a bug's perspective, so production designer Bill Cone and art director Bob Pauley, along with the talented technicians at Pixar designed the "Bugcam." This tiny video camera attached to the end of a stick was rolled and dragged through the local flora and vegetation and under leaves and grass to help the team see things as a bug might. No exotic field trips were necessary. They found all the research and inspiration they could possibly want literally in their own backyard.

According to Cone, "The world we've created for A Bug's Life is an abstraction of reality that appears real because of the level of detail we've given to the surfaces and the way light moves across objects and creates shadows. We've taken the beautiful and elegant patterns in nature, especially in plants and in the texture on rocks, and incorporated them into our environment. The beauty of this film is that the audience is seeing things from an ant's perspective.

Director of photography and lighting expert Sharon Calahan explains, "The biggest challenge for us was to get the surfaces and the lights to talk to each other. In order to make objects appear to be translucent or back lit, the lights and the shaders had to communicate. Some scenes have nearly 120 source lights, requiring the lighting team to calculate trajectories and shadows that would be logical or dramatic.

Acclaimed composer/songwriter Randy Newman already holding nine Oscars, who had previously worked with the filmmakers on "Toy Story," wrote an epic score for the film as well as the end credit song, "The Time of Your Life."

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