Pixar’s A Bug’s Life has shown that Disney’s old trick of retelling a fable can be made interesting and wholly new. For A Bug’s Life really is a retelling of Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper, with a twist: The hero of the ants is an inventor or even, an entrepreneur, who, as the tag line notes, goes on an “epic of miniature proportions” to rescue his colony from the roving bands of grasshoppers who raid their island. With such a character, Pixar combines the patient dedication of the ant to his future with the wonder that belongs to the entrepreneur.
I am referring, of course, to Flik, an ant among ants. Flik is innovative while his fellow ants are staid. As with all innovators, Flik brings a bit too much creative destruction to the ant colony. (See Edison’s burning of his parents’ barn, for instance.)
His mechanical harvester could serve to liberate the ants from their drudgery, but instead, causes his exile when it malfunctions and forces the ants in further hock to the grasshoppers.
But Flik, ever the entrepreneur, sees that exile as an opportunity – to find warrior bugs to defend his city – and goes off to the big city to find them. Of course, he doesn’t realize that he, not they, was the hero he was looking for. In a comic misunderstanding that provides the drama, Flik’s hope to find bigger, tougher bugs is met by a bunch of circus bugs, also, down and nearly out.
You see bugs live as Hobbes said man does, “nasty, brutish, and short.” They need a community found on just principles, but those principles are sorely lacking under the ants and their queen. They are in thrall to the grasshoppers. Hopper, the villain, is pretty sanguine about just how that world works, sounding as if he learned it at Mufasa’s knee.
Hopper: It’s a bug-eat-bug world out there, princess. One of those Circle of Life kind of things. Now let me tell you how things are supposed to work: The sun grows the food, the ants pick the food, the grasshoppers eat the food…
As his bumbling sidekick, Molt, reminds Hopper, grasshoppers are eaten by birds. Alas, it seems nothing is left from nature’s order. Refusing to recognize his own weakness – his own place in the circle of life – ultimately proves to be Hopper’s own undoing. Trying to earn his bread off of another bug’s sweat makes him a tyrant and refusal to recognize tyrants is, after all, obedience to God.
Andrew Stanton, co-writer and avowed Christian, knows all this. (He even seems to have a bit of fun with his own Christianity in this voice-over.)
Flik, who leads the youngest ants against the grasshopper hierarchy, is following God’s commandment and leading his people to a new Israel, founded on just principles. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” indeed.
The political principles do not end there. It might seem a stretch to see an ant as a Jeffersonian hero, but that’s what Flik is. He recognizes what Jefferson did.
The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
Flik imagines a different life for himself, for the colony. He understands, as Hopper does:
“You let one ant stand up to us, and they all might stand up! Those ‘puny light ants’ outnumber us a hundred to one. And if we ever let them figure out that out… There goes our way of life! It’s not about food. It’s about keeping those ants in line.”
Flik is the first to step out of line, and his example proves that he won’t be the last.
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