"A Bug's Life" tells the story of an ant colony's successful revolt against the grasshoppers, led by Hopper, who oppress them. Following "Toy Story", "A Bug's Life" is John Lasseter's second completely computer-animated feature film, in which the Californian once again lives up to his reputation as the world's best animator. A special camera system was developed especially for this film, which shows the audience the ants' world from a subjective perspective. Crowd scenes with over 600 ants and the surrounding plant world required four times as much computational power as "Toy Story".

As Toy Story was entering its final year of pro duction in 1994, John Lasseter and his team began actively exploring ideas for their next feature pro ject. A film involving insect characters had been discussed and seemed a natural, because it could utilize the strengths and advantages of computer animation.

The spark of the idea for A Bug's Life came one day as Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft were having lunch. They began talking about the classic Aesop fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, in which a starving grasshopper, fiddle in hand, drops in on a family of ants and begs for a bite to eat. When the grass hopper confesses that he spent the summer months making music, the industrious ants turn him away and suggest that he spend the winter dancing. Aesop's conclusion was "there's a time to work and a time to play." Stanton and Ranft concluded that it might make for a pretty interesting scenario if the grasshopper, being much bigger than the ants, de cided to just take the food. Their active imaginations began racing and they laughed at the humorous possibilities.

Lasseter shared their enthusiasm and helped flesh out the idea. Bringing the colourful cast of characters from A Bug's Life to the screen required the collective talents of more than sixty animators. Unlike traditional Disney features, where one supervising animator and a team are assigned to work on a particular character, animators at Pixar would typically work on many if not all of the characters during the course of production. With a large cast of bugs that included 13 main characters and six supporting players, each one posing its own set of challenges, and scenes often involving as many as eight or nine characters, this was an extremely difficult film to work on from an animation standpoint. From a purely technical standpoint, A Bug's Life represents a major advance over its predecessor, Toy Story. New tools and procedures had to be created specifically to meet the demands of this production while the experience gained on their first film allowed the Pixar team to take the art form to the next level of accomplishment in all areas. The production itself had ten times the computing power of Toy Story, with 1,000 processors in the RenderFarm operating about four times faster than the ones on the last film. But those factors were counterbalanced by the enormous complexity of the film. For example, the most difficult scenes in A Bug's Life still required over 100 hours per frame to render. The average shot clocked in at about 15 hours of render time."

Toy Story proved that we could do anything if we put out minds to it," says Lasseter. "It reinforced my be lief that it's not the technology that's important; the story and the characters need 100% of our focus. All the technology is derived from what's needed in the story. The foundation of the way we work is that art challenges technology, then technology inspires the art.