A Bug's Life

0:00:03.5 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres. Socrates once said the unexamined life is not worth living. And if he were around today, I’m sure he’d also say that A Bug’s Life is totally worth examining. Join us as we dive into the 1998 Disney Pixar romp to find out what we can take away with us and what we can leave on the offering stone. With me today is deputy managing editor at Reason, and our old friend, Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:31.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m happy to be back at my old stomping grounds today, Landry.

[laughter]

0:00:36.1 Landry Ayres: We’re happy to have you, and interim director @libertarianism.org and returning guest Paul Meany.

0:00:42.7 Paul Meany: Happy to be here.

0:00:45.5 Landry Ayres: So A Bug’s Life, is it worth it to draw some sort of economic or political or philosophical lesson from this film? And if so, what might it be? Because, you see a lot of conflicting analysis of this movie, whether it’s about class struggle or it’s about the failures of bureaucrats lording over people who want to engage in free enterprise or something else. And I have trouble nailing down any one particular lesson, but everybody seems to have one that they take away from it. Is there one that you have settled on, each of you? And if so, what is it and how valuable is it?

0:01:31.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I say this with like a little bit of a caveat, because I was reading an article about, that the directors did and the producers just like a Q and A, and they were talking about how they, everyone is reading far too much into this film and that this was not like their intention to make like a communism versus capitalism or socialism versus capitalism movie. But I think that’s kind of the beauty of when you look back at older movies and everyone like over analyzes them. So maybe that wasn’t their intention, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that, that storyline isn’t there. However, kind of what I glean from the movie, especially watching it now versus watching it when I was little, is more of like how it’s like an innovator story. So like Flik to me is just like, has a very much an entrepreneurial spirit.

0:02:18.9 Natalie Dowzicky: He wants to like get out of the rut that he sees, you know, not only his family, but like other ants like him in, and he’s like very proactive about wanting to create a way to gather the grain more efficiently. And I think it’s more of like an innovator story. And like, obviously Flik is in the hero’s journey here, in a very loose sense. But I don’t… I don’t read so much of the socialism versus capitalism is that… In the movie as much as maybe Paul does.

[laughter]

0:02:52.5 Paul Meany: Well, what I would say is, is whether or not it’s a worthy question to ask, what can we learn from this movie? It doesn’t matter what I think. Multiple academic articles have been written about what Bug’s Life is about and how it can be used to teach people different ideas. So it doesn’t matter what I think, people have decided it’s important already. So it’s worthy of engaging with.

0:03:11.5 Natalie Dowzicky: So they’ve… They’ve validated your thoughts.

[laughter]

0:03:13.7 Paul Meany: They’ve validated it a lot, you know? Well, no, they’re on the… A lot of people are on their opposite end of the spectrum for me. But I think the big lesson from Bug’s Life is how much aesthetics covers our worldview because being the big loser I am, I read an awful lot about ants before watching Bug’s Life again.

0:03:29.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my God.

0:03:29.4 Paul Meany: And one of the things is that ants used to be used as this kind of… In the medieval ages and sometimes in political thought and a little bit in the early modern period, ants are always supposed to be the super best organism. They always know their nature. They do what they’re told. They’re kind of… They have no ego of their own, so they’re better. Because they have no will of their own, they’re a better ideal society.

0:03:47.7 Paul Meany: You can also see this in like bees as well, in medieval thought and also at Bernard Mandeville as well. But the idea of animals having some sort of way that humans can learn from like, oh, the way ants are. There’s also, The Once And Future King also has a little bit about ants and militarism, but because ants are collectivistic and ’cause at the end of the movie, they all link arms together and stomp over the grasshoppers, everyone just assumes it’s a socialist film, just based off of like aesthetics. Obviously, the grasshoppers aren’t really chairman Mau or Stalin or anything. They’re just a bunch of gangsters and they’re even portrayed to be like that. And I was always confused when people were saying the grasshoppers were these capitalists ’cause when they… When they rev their wings, it sounds like motorbikes. And then when they’re off relaxing, they’re off, you know, in some borough like in the middle of Mexico, they’ve run off the border.

0:04:30.9 Paul Meany: Like they’re supposed to be gangsters that steal. They’re not some sort of very organized state or some capitalists, and I’ve always found it so bizarre. But I think just because of the aesthetics of the ants, the idea of collectivism, some of the lines in the movie, people will just get the wrong idea and think all of a sudden, oh yeah, must be about the working class rising up. Even though Flik, as you said before, is like an innovator. It’s a story about someone trying to show different ways of doing things. That’s part of Flik’s kind of story, and his individualism is that he shows Dot the little seed and says, “Everyone could be this, you just have to wait a little bit of time.” And he convinces the ants to think of themselves as more than they are, but that’s kind of lost on people.

0:05:10.1 Landry Ayres: And I think it really is lost on a lot of people because people want to read something into this film that it really is not. And I see this in a lot of different coverage on both sides of the issue. People have written about how it is explicitly about class struggle and how the ants are the working class who are being oppressed by sort of corporate or you know, the 1% overlords sort of as such. And then on the other side that the grasshoppers are bureaucrats who are extracting wealth from the people who are engaging in the work that actually benefits every single person. And none of those are exactly true. But as we’ve said before, that wasn’t the intent of the filmmakers. They’re not intending to tell a story about that. It is, in an individualistic sense, a story about a hero who forges his own path and is an innovator and tries new things in the sense that almost any hero’s journey is sort of an individualistic kind of Western way of looking at stories.

0:06:13.6 Landry Ayres: And I think that there is some nuance to parse there, and some ways of looking at how that might support more libertarian themes as opposed to the more progressive, collectivist themes some people might read into it. But that’s more about the tropes and structure of Western stories, I think rather than A Bug’s Life in particular. And I just want to talk about all of the different ways that I don’t think it makes sense. So you mentioned the grasshoppers. And the grasshoppers are interesting because they could be described as like bureaucrats or people who… Or the 1% or something but…

0:06:47.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Or, I even read an article that the grasshoppers were described as like the property owners.

0:06:52.1 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:06:53.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Which also didn’t really make sense.

0:06:54.4 Landry Ayres: Also not accurate [chuckle] because they contribute nothing to the ant society on a sort of benevolent or malevolent level. Like they’re not even attempting the facade of trying to provide services that a socialist state might provide.

0:07:11.1 Paul Meany: I will disagree with that. I will disagree very quickly. On the services, yes. The services, yes. So they’re not gonna try and provide healthcare and all this, but there’s one part where Hopper is talking at the very beginning of the film when he is introduced. And he’s saying, “You know, there’s a lot of other bugs out there, and we’re protecting you.”

0:07:25.9 Landry Ayres: Well, here’s what I’ll say, it’s not that he’s actually providing… It’s a protection racket. It’s a criminal organization as such. So they’re not actually providing like a real capitalist service that engages in free market exchange. It’s a coerced implied threat of violence, which is that either we are going to allow other people to do this to you, or perhaps we’re going to use the Thumper, our crazy grasshopper to eat you because you haven’t given us what we wanted. So in a real sense, it’s neither of those things. And you could read that it is… Go ahead.

0:08:00.4 Paul Meany: I’ll just say a sentence that’s never been said before I think, to understand Bug’s Life one must understand Franz Oppenheimer’s, The State.

0:08:08.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my God. I’m so done with you.

0:08:13.5 Paul Meany: So [chuckle] there’s a book in 1908, and it theorizes… This guy is Franz Oppenheimer, and he is theorizing, the state was actually original… What we call the state today was originally roving bands of barbarians and warlords who eventually settled down and just collected tax money off of people. And that’s basically what the Bug’s Life is about, the grasshoppers. So some people say the grasshoppers are capitalists. In the Marxian language, they take away the surplus labor, the little bit of extra on top from the ants, and they keep it for themselves, in what’s called primitive accumulation.

0:08:39.0 Paul Meany: But what’s really is, is that they’re just a bunch of gangsters who come around and collect the protection racket, just like you said, but people are kind of blinded to that almost, because they think that the story’s unequal. And it’s… Inequality is such a big theme today in politics. The grasshopper is like… The ants definitely live a very meagre life and doesn’t seem particularly enjoyable. But at the end of the day, they’re all just eating like grains. The inequality isn’t really what matters. It matters that they lazy around all day, ’cause the original idea behind Bug’s Life is there’s Aesop’s fables, which are these ancient Greek stories that always have a little message to them. And there’s one where there’s a cicada, not a grasshopper originally, but he sings and dances all summer while the ant diligent collects food. And then when summer’s over, the grass or the cicada says, “Can I have some of your food?” to the ant. And the ant says, “why don’t you dance and sing through all of winter?”

0:09:25.6 Paul Meany: And the lads who made Bugs Life decided what if the grasshopper or cicada just decided to take the food? And that’s what they do. And a lot of Bug’s Life is about how awful people like Hopper are, ’cause they don’t even make any sort of effort to try and justify what they’re doing. They are primitive, futile gangsters. They’re much more like medieval warlords or something than anything else. If they’re capitalists, what’s the service they’re providing? What are they selling? Is there even a middle class? Is there a currency exchange? None of this exists, obviously ’cause it’s a kids film and it’s about bugs.

0:09:54.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I think, too, there’s like… This is definitely reading into it, but there’s also like a religious undertone to it. So like they’re putting their grain that they’re collecting on the offering stone, and then they like go and hide to make sure, like hide from Hoppers, like in the beginning, to make sure that they don’t face the wrath of Hopper. It’s almost like there’s some type of underlying understanding that the grasshoppers are like their saviors or like… It’s like almost perverse. And I think it’s more so the language of like the offering stone. It’s not like… They’re not saying, “Oh, they’re stealing our food.” They’re like, “We’re putting it up on the offering stone,” as in like, it’s our pleasure to serve Hopper. You know what I mean? And I think that language is very subtle, but there… It definitely has religious undertones too.

[music]

0:10:48.0 Landry Ayres: I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the ant and the grasshopper, Paul, because I was reading about this too. I didn’t realize that this was an Aesop’s fable reference and a sort of twisting of the story. But it makes sense when you look into it because the original fable itself has been told and retold and reframed so many different times throughout history that it’s kind of emblematic of the points that we were making earlier about people are able to read into this story, what they really, really want. So there are very conflicting lessons and morals that one can extract from the ant and the grasshopper. And they have over time about who is the virtuous one in the relationship? Is it the ant who works hard all summer and then during the winter is able to sustain himself and the grasshopper who is lazy for not being diligent and working for what he needs, or is the ant not virtuous because he doesn’t share the things that he has accumulated? And that if you have wealth, you should provide it? And it really comes down to the sort of virtues that you think are more important. And I wonder if there’s a sort of, you know opposition and a line that we can’t cross there because it becomes about what you value over the other, the way you interpret this story and how do you get past that, and is there a point in that case?

0:12:23.5 Landry Ayres: And for instance I think it was… Let me see here. Oh, yes, Roger L’Estrange comment that the ants virtue and vice in many cases are hardly indistinguishable but by the name. So it’s really about the labels that we put on these characters more than anything that they are intending to tell and that’s the same with the like the grasshoppers or socialist bureaucrats or their capitalist extractors who are taking away the labor of the the people that are doing all of the work. You can find a way to bend the interpretation of a story when it is as simple as A Bug’s Life and make it say what you want, and that doesn’t mean any of them are going to be necessarily strong arguments but people are going to make them, and I kind of grow frustrated with that, that people will look to these stories that do not have outright morals, or if they do, it is much simpler it’s about the individual achievements of particular characters than any system that they’re trying to critique. But that inherently does support libertarian themes which is that the individual, when given the freedom to do what they think is best and take chances and experiment, has the capacity to make a difference in the world. So who knows, maybe I’m totally wrong and that is the moral and it’s inherent in the story and you know…

0:13:56.1 Paul Meany: I think there’s a moral to the story that can be viewed in the libertarian lens, and it’s that we can all be more than what we think. A lot of the movie characters have an idea about what the world looks like and it kind of comes… There’s a lot of paralysis in real life that people thought that there was a natural order to the world for a very long time, this is the way things are, some people are born this way some people are born that way, there’s different classes, different laws, different aristocrats, all the above. But the reality is that all that doesn’t exist, and it’s just stories we tell ourselves. And so the beginning of the movie we hear Hopper’s version of what the story of life, he says… He even makes a reference to Lion King with the circle of life because the lion king is that famous Mufasa just basically explains why it’s okay to eat Wildebeests to his son. And it’s kind of like a joke. The Lion King almost like supports some sort of like divine monarchy when you read into it way too much like we’re doing now.

0:14:48.1 Paul Meany: But in Bug’s Life, Hopper basically says ants are put on this earth to pick food for grasshoppers. By the end of the film, I think it’s princess Atta that says, well, we pick all this food, you don’t do anything, you just consume. [0:14:56.5] ____ did’t say that. But realizing that the way people talk about the world it isn’t that way at all. And that’s kind of goes back to Flik and Dot with the whole idea of the seed that we can be so much more. And by the end of the film, the colony is completely unrecognizable. So I think if there was one thing I want to take with this film, I think it’s quite politically neutral, it has a bit of a libertarian leaning, is that we can all kind of kick away what we think our so-​called nature is and become a lot more.

0:15:26.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I also think too that there’s like a meta… More meta discussion going on because it is ants, so like if the if this movie had a different set of bugs, which I was debating this with someone. If this movie had… They were a group of butterflies, which would make no sense but whatever, I think people wouldn’t be reading as much of a political story into it, just because ants are always… Ants and bees are the two insects that are always used in like a… In a collectivist mindset to demonstrate like what we were talking about earlier, and I think that almost… By just in the nature of Flik and his buddies being ants makes you automatically assume that they’re like they’re taking the position of like the working class. Just because, you know, all the stories and like all everyone that understands anything about ants knows that they don’t really necessarily have like a mind of their own, they’re very much hive mind like bees, and they have one person, one ant that they answer to.

0:16:30.9 Natalie Dowzicky: And I think that help… Is why a lot of people maybe read into this story too much from like a collectivist mindset. I also went down a little rabbit hole, so Bug’s Life came out the same time as ants. They were actually developed in tandem before a studio split, and this is also one a lot of directors and producers were going after like good stories versus like going after remaking like you know superhero movies with like crossing universes, so there was like a lot of competition for this story, so it’s split in tandem, and then ants… They created Antz and Bug’s Life. But the only other insect movie I could come up with especially like coming out of Disney or like the bigger studios was Bee Movie, [0:17:18.6] ____?

0:17:18.7 Landry Ayres: I was gonna say why didn’t we talk about Bee Movie in tandem with this because there’s so much that is similar but totally not at all, [chuckle] like it goes in a completely different direction.

0:17:34.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, but like… And then I was like that’s so odd because there’s like… In one year you had two very like bug-​centric movies and then we don’t get anything until Bee Movie, which wasn’t… God, it must have been like at least 15 years later that Bee Movie came out, but still I thought it was interesting that these came out around the same time. I don’t like ants. I’ve only probably only seen that movie maybe twice ever.

0:17:57.6 Paul Meany: Do you remember the woodlice scene, the war they have?

0:17:58.1 Landry Ayres: They have a war?

0:18:00.9 Paul Meany: Okay, you haven’t seen it in too long then [chuckle] because in Antz, there’s the most traumatic scene where they go off, like the main character accidentally is drafted into a war, and they fight… No, they’re termites. They’re not called woodlice, they’re called termites.

0:18:08.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I do, I remember that larger part.

0:18:12.8 Paul Meany: And that was traumatic, and there’s that guy… There’s one guy who like gets melted and loses his whole body and everything. It is like terrifying for a child’s movie.

0:18:23.4 Landry Ayres: Well, Antz is known to be a much more adult film, but I will say A Bug’s Life has some shocking dark almost imagery in it, like Hopper threatens to kill his brother at one point, like if I hadn’t promised mom that I wouldn’t kill you, I’d kill you which I don’t know how many times in Toy story or Pixar movie usually there’s like a metaphor or something but he’s like I will kill you, and then there’s animated blood in the tapestry that the kids make at the presentation and then they drop Hopper into the like birds who were like eating him at the very end. And of course, they fade to black, and they cut away. But I was like I’m sure there’s exceptions to this, and it can get a lot darker in certain Pixar films and such, but I was kind of shocked at some of this, I do have to say.

0:19:18.9 Natalie Dowzicky: I think this was like in an edgier time of Pixar too, right? It’s not Pixar… It’s… I think the list I looked at, it’s not even in the top 15 of Pixar movies on the list.

0:19:25.4 Landry Ayres: Well ’cause it’s not as good as all the other ones.

0:19:27.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, yeah, ’cause it’s not…

0:19:27.9 Landry Ayres: I’ll come out and say it. I’ll say it.

0:19:28.9 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s not WALL-E, so… [chuckle]

0:19:30.5 Landry Ayres: I watched this movie and I was like, this could’ve been a TV episode, and they stretched it into an hour and 39 minutes. I was like, come on, let’s get in and out.

0:19:36.5 Paul Meany: It’s a little bit of a short story. But it’s a weird movie ’cause they kind of copy Seven Samurai’s plot. Have you ever heard about this, Landry?

0:19:43.4 Landry Ayres: Yes. Yeah. When they go to the city, especially, yeah.

0:19:47.3 Paul Meany: That… I always found that so bizarre. But I was gonna say, beyond the gore and explicit killing, one thing I thought was kind of interesting today is the ladybug character of Francis. I think that’s well, well before it’s time.

0:19:58.7 Landry Ayres: And that’s a good lesson, it really is. They teach Francis to get in touch with his feminine side and understand this sort of… It’s not explicitly gender fluidity, but it’s certainly trying to reject heteronormative gender roles, which I think is an exciting thing that we can introduce to people even if it’s not explicit, in a sense. But it’s kind of just being like, “Relax about it. It’s not as rigid as you need to sort of portray it as, and have fun with it,” which it is kinda cool, because he’s very rooted in his… And sort of rejecting the perception that he gets as a male ladybug, but learning to embrace it and be celebrated for the things that he sort of is presenting as, allows him to feel more complete about himself and…

0:20:54.3 Paul Meany: Look at all the content you’re getting out of Bug’s Life just after you badmouth it. After you say it’s not a good movie, you just had this little spiel about how deep it is, how much was going on. It’s like…

0:21:00.1 Landry Ayres: Well… Well, alright.

0:21:02.7 Natalie Dowzicky: No, it’s… We’re not badmouthing it. It’s just not… It’s not…

0:21:06.7 Landry Ayres: It’s not a Toy Story, it’s not WALL-E, it’s…

0:21:07.8 Natalie Dowzicky: A Toy Story, yeah.

0:21:09.2 Landry Ayres: It’s… Right. It’s not that great for a Pixar film.

0:21:12.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:21:13.0 Paul Meany: That’s your opinion.

0:21:13.7 Landry Ayres: I will say, there is… The casting though in this movie is great. Phyllis Diller is awesome. Ashley Tisdale and Hayden Panettiere as child stars, I wouldn’t have ever known it was them, but it’s them. All of the circus animals, amazing casting.

0:21:32.3 Natalie Dowzicky: There is an interesting thing going on, because there’s a lot of in… Through the whole movie, there’s a lot of like in-​group and out-​group interesting social dynamics going on. And the circus bugs are on the fringes of the ant society, right? So they have access, like ants can go and talk to them, but at the same time, they’re almost not in the same economy. They’re like a traveling circus troupe. And I thought that was the best way to be like… To show Flik that there’s a world outside of the…

0:22:03.9 Paul Meany: I wish they spent more time in the city. They didn’t really spend… He went to one bar, found the first group of people he saw, and he was like, “Boom, these are my guys. This is the one.”

0:22:12.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay, but I do that too, so…

[laughter]

0:22:15.2 Landry Ayres: I get that. I was like, “I’m gonna go back to my house. It’s not worth it.” This is interesting though, because I think it is emblematic of… Because we were trying to label what type of political or economic system is actually going on in Antz if you’re gonna critique it. And it’s not pure socialism by any means, and it’s not capitalism ’cause we’re not seeing markets or exchange or anything. The best thing that I think you could kind of read into it in… And this is being charitable, I think, is that it’s kind of a state capacity libertarianism message, where it’s like, there are definitely forces at work in the ant colony that are trying to make everything much more equitable. So there’s a strong kind of welfare state where everyone pitches in and their work contributes to a collective thing that gets distributed to everyone at some level. But there is a little bit of room for innovation, at least toward the end. We see the [0:23:14.8] ____ launchers that Flik develops being used by everyone in this sort of technological innovation. But then outside of the ant colony, you’re not seeing that. It’s kind of run down. The city is kind of portrayed as dirty and gross. And even though there’s a lot going on…

0:23:30.4 Paul Meany: Well, it is outside of the caravan.

0:23:32.4 Landry Ayres: Right.

0:23:32.6 Paul Meany: And that’s where they live, that’s just the way they do.

0:23:34.4 Landry Ayres: Well, right. But they’re all happy, but it’s kind of… To me maybe it’s a sort of examination of how nation states that have strong welfare or equity are not necessarily always super friendly to outsiders. For instance, I’m in Finland, that’s where I live. And I mean, as the people at a lot of places will tell you, they’re kind of known for being held up by people on the left as like ultra progressive socialist, and people on the right will very quickly tell you that people in Nordic countries actually have much, much less business regulation. They just have a large welfare state, but the lax regulations in the private market allow that sort of stuff to transfer to the welfare state. And so marrying them, while it’s not necessarily making either of those sides really happy, neither side is really… Has the boogeyman or the person they wanna hold up as the exemplar in the Nordic model.

0:24:37.2 Landry Ayres: But you can also point to that and say, “While it’s great that the Nordic model can do that, it is not necessarily super easy to access,” if you are outside of the in-​group, as Natalie was getting at with this in-​group, out-​group dynamic. They purposefully make it kind of hard and cumbersome to get in to get access to those things. Now, there are ways… If you were to visit a place like Finland, like I… Where I live, you will have access just upon visiting to a lot of state services, but to get full access, to reap the full benefits, there are a lot of hoops that you have to go through and the bureaucracy is very thick. And that is designed in a way, not necessarily to discourage people from engaging with it, but it is symptomatic of the work that it takes to put into that. And it is discouraging to get people, and it shows that it isn’t as scalable as people might like to admit, and may not work in all circumstances. So if there is a comment about the type of markets and economic model that you could make, maybe it’s something like that instead.

0:25:50.2 Paul Meany: And you said that Bug’s Life there wasn’t anything to say.

0:25:52.9 Landry Ayres: Meaning?

0:25:53.0 Paul Meany: You said this…

0:25:54.3 Landry Ayres: You’re pulling it out of me, it’s all you, you and Natalie.

0:25:58.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I would like to point out that Meany has wanted to talk about A Bug’s Life.

[chuckle]

0:26:02.7 Natalie Dowzicky: For how long?

0:26:05.2 Paul Meany: For a while.

0:26:05.3 Natalie Dowzicky: I think it’s been three years…

0:26:06.5 Paul Meany: So no, it’s been longer actually ’cause…

0:26:07.9 Landry Ayres: Three years that he said it out loud also. It’s been in his heart for so much longer.

0:26:13.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh yeah, definitely, no, I didn’t watch a lot of kids’ films growing up. So this is one of my ones that I was a big fan of, I didn’t really like… When you guys talk about Pixar, I actually didn’t know which ones are Pixar, and which one’s Disney, ’cause I wasn’t really into all that as a kid, but I really did like… I liked A Bug’s Life and Mulan. Those are the ones I really liked, and I don’t really know why I liked Bugs Life so much as a kid, ’cause it’s not like I thought about it so much I was like, “I wanna be like Flik,” or anything, ’cause he’s like a flipping bug, but I don’t know, something about it was really cool to me.

0:26:39.5 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s also quite confusing why you would like Mulan, but we’ll get back to that…

0:26:42.7 Paul Meany: ‘Cause she’s a queen.

0:26:43.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Some other time, I think.

0:26:44.0 Paul Meany: I don’t know what was so cool about it.

0:26:45.2 Landry Ayres: She is a queen, and the music is great, and it’s very funny, and Mulan is great.

0:26:49.2 Natalie Dowzicky: But the new Mulan doesn’t have my favourite character in it so…

0:26:51.8 Paul Meany: Mushu?

0:26:53.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Mushu…

0:26:53.9 Paul Meany: Of course.

0:26:54.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Rip.

0:26:54.5 Landry Ayres: Also, did they do the music in the new Mulan? Did they have a reflection? When will my reflection show? Is it called reflection? I don’t know if that’s what it’s called, but it’s a great song. It is a…

0:27:04.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Great song.

0:27:05.3 Landry Ayres: It’s a barn burner.

0:27:08.4 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s a banger [chuckle]

[music]

0:27:11.4 Paul Meany: I was gonna say, I think that the ants, I think you’re giving them too much credit, ’cause in the story, none of them have ever left the island, so they’ve never left the island, none of them have ever been to the city before, they go there. I think the movie, they definitely… Maybe they wanted to spend more time in the city. Or maybe they don’t have more of a plot there, and they just of zoomed over it, ’cause it would have been awkward to do or they didn’t have many ideas on it, but either way, the bugs are basically like tribal people, they just pick the food, they go into their mound and even another part of it that I thought was kind of interesting is there’s a line where the princess is talking, and she’s like, “Our former ants they built this massive colony, we can do it too.” And I think that’s… I’m sorry to bring it always back to history, but it’s kind of an interesting idea, considering for…

0:27:56.6 Paul Meany: After the fall of the Roman Empire, a lot of medieval people lived in the ruins of a much greater civilization and were like, “Oh, I could never do that, we could never build aqueducts that long or structures or that kind of dome or cement or anything like that.” And sometimes I wonder in Bug’s Life, it kinda… You get the impression that there’s some sort of decline in the colony, ’cause earlier on, we mentioned that some people associate the ants with the working class, and I find that like… I don’t know how people think they’re saying that like a sympathetic way, ’cause the first ant you see in the movie, a leaf falls, and he can’t walk around it without the help of a supervisor…

[chuckle]

0:28:30.4 Paul Meany: Any Marxist saying that a supervisor is required in production sounds bizarre to me, to be honest, like it’s just… This idea that working-​class people can’t do anything for themselves.

0:28:39.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, there was also this really great part where Flik was upset and he was like “Just squish me, just squish me.” And he put his head under the one bug’s foot, was like, “Just step on me and squish me.” [chuckle] which is also dark, back to the Pixar thing…

0:28:56.1 Paul Meany: That is actually really dark, yeah.

0:29:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Really dark, yeah. I also think another reason that the Hopper and his buddies are more bullies, but it also gets read into that they have more of a maniac leadership style, let’s call it. He says this one quote, and I think we should definitely include it, he says, “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up, those puny little ants outnumber us 100 to one. If they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life. It’s not about food, it’s about keeping those ants in line.” So I think that line specifically is why people read so much into this movie because it’s packed with the idea that Hopper is fully aware, like fully conscious of what him and his gang is doing, and he’s also fully aware that it’s like hanging on a very, very tight rope, and if any ants step out of line, they could all suddenly get together and realize like, “Oh, we don’t actually have to be doing this anymore.” Which is why I think people read the social dynamics into it, and look at it from a political lens, just because that specific line is like…

0:30:11.5 Paul Meany: You’ve hit the nail on the head.

0:30:12.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes.

0:30:12.7 Paul Meany: That is the line, years and years ago, I was in college and I was finishing my dissertation and I was a bit tired, and I was like, “I need to chill out and just watch some movie that doesn’t require any thought.” Little did I know I put on Bug’s Life, thinking I wouldn’t be… I’d be like, “Oh, this is just a kids’ film, whatever.” And that line completely grabbed me. And so I looked it up online, and I found a bunch of different places that posted it, all sorts, like all these communist Facebook groups like Black Lives Matters ones, even some conservative ones had some ideas about it for a while. So the fact that everyone can hop on this one idea that there’s a boogeyman out there, that there’s someone who’s just a parasite who takes and takes and takes more, and they get away with it somehow, and there’s hundreds of regular people who need to get back at them, that’s a pretty powerful idea.

0:30:56.1 Landry Ayres: It’s kind of a populist message, which, if anything, maybe that’s the lasting impact of A Bug’s Life, people don’t realize it was… People label all these things, the election of Trump, et cetera, et cetera. No, it all goes back to A Bug’s Life, the authoritarian populism, that’s what it is.

0:31:12.4 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s where it all started. [chuckle]

[music]

0:31:16.0 Paul Meany: I also… The movie does just gloss over the fact that like, “Oh yeah, let’s have a princess, let’s have a queen, and all that, let’s not make any fundamental changes to our structure of government.” But sure, it’s a kids’ movie.

0:31:26.2 Landry Ayres: And also, so all the ants are related, so it’s like a big…

0:31:30.0 Paul Meany: Didn’t get that.

0:31:30.5 Landry Ayres: Family as opposed to… It’s like a family ties, matrilineal monarchy with socialist… Like a large welfare state that is being governed by a protection racket by… Also, how many grasshoppers are there?

[chuckle]

0:31:50.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Unclear.

0:31:51.4 Landry Ayres: On screen…

0:31:52.3 Paul Meany: They’re outnumbered 100 to one.

0:31:55.5 Landry Ayres: Exactly. That’s why I’m like… But also in the real world, I don’t know the answer to this, I’m not a scientist, scientists get in the comments or the podcast reviews or tweet at us or something. Could the amount of grass… Who would win in a fight? Let’s see, 10 grass hoppers or a 1000 ants, would? I’m curious because I wanna know, like where did they get the… Was it just the fable? I don’t… No, I don’t believe…

0:32:26.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Also…

0:32:26.8 Landry Ayres: I think it ruins it for me. It takes me out of it.

0:32:29.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Do grasshoppers eat ants in real life?

0:32:32.9 Paul Meany: So many questions to ask.

0:32:34.1 Landry Ayres: Well, I don’t know. Do they, or do they just don’t beat them up?

0:32:36.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I don’t think they do.

0:32:36.6 Landry Ayres: Like, because they have a grudge or something. Also why is…

0:32:38.9 Paul Meany: I looked, and it’s the first thing that comes up, do grasshoppers eat ants? They do not eat ants. They eat plants, leaves, and cereal crops.

0:32:45.4 Landry Ayres: Also, why…

0:32:45.9 Paul Meany: In the movie, they don’t eat them. They actually… Yeah, that’s a good point, actually. They actually don’t eat them in the movie. They are specifically using them as like slave labor, basically.

0:32:54.4 Landry Ayres: And why is Thumper the grasshopper so angry while all the other ones seem just kind of like bums or jerks or something? Like, if anything, that’s the reason. That’s another reason really terrible thing.

0:33:09.1 Paul Meany: Thumper is the wild card. He’s the one they like bring out, and to stick him people.

0:33:13.3 Landry Ayres: I know, that’s why… But I’m like, what happen… Who hurt you? I’m like, they… This obviously very traumatized grasshopper they are using for selfish ends. And if anything, just furthering the cycle of violence that seems to have been acted upon him. And it’s just… I mean, it just goes… They, I mean, they’re very villainous. I’ll give them that.

0:33:33.8 Paul Meany: No female grasshoppers. It’s a mans game there.

0:33:36.5 Landry Ayres: I mean, if that’s not commentary, I don’t know what is.

0:33:40.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. Another thing I was just thinking of… So are ants like… So are… There are queen ants, is that accurate?

0:33:48.6 Paul Meany: Yes.

0:33:49.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Like in real life, like a queen ant?

0:33:51.4 Paul Meany: Is that [0:33:51.5] ____?

0:33:51.5 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:33:51.6 Natalie Dowzicky: No, no. ‘Cause like I was like, well, why is the… Why is the ant a princess then?

0:33:56.4 Paul Meany: She’s the queen in training.

0:33:56.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Is that implying that she is not the queen? [chuckle]

0:34:01.4 Paul Meany: Not yet. Not yet.

0:34:02.4 Landry Ayres: Well, Phyllis Diller’s character is the queen, right?

0:34:05.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:34:05.8 Landry Ayres: The old one?

0:34:06.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:34:06.7 Landry Ayres: So she’s the queen. And then… So, but then the princess ant is there, but also do… Are there other female ants in ant colonies or is there just the one?

0:34:18.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I think so. I don’t think they’re like bees.

0:34:19.3 Landry Ayres: Which is interesting, because… Okay, okay. I was gonna say. But also it’s interesting because male ants don’t usually live that long, like they make a joke about them living short in the movie, but also they don’t show them like working a little bit, and then they’ll be like, and now I’ll die. Now of course, we’re looking on the… Like very shallow timeline here. What looks like a whole life to these bugs might be a day or something to us, but who knows?

0:34:46.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I don’t know.

0:34:46.8 Paul Meany: If you ever want to learn more about ants, there’s a great YouTube channel called ants Canada of a guy who like has…

0:34:51.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, my God.

0:34:52.2 Paul Meany: Big colonies of ants. And I’ve learned so much about it from it. I did not realize the whole… The idea that there’s the queen ants or anything like that. That blew my mind. But finally learned more about ants.

0:35:01.8 Landry Ayres: I didn’t know that female ants had wings and could fly.

0:35:05.4 Paul Meany: Yeah.

0:35:06.0 Landry Ayres: I didn’t know that. I was watching this, and I was like that’s not scientific. It’s totally true, which as a person from Texas where fire ants exist is terrifying, but I don’t know if fire ants have wings, but I’m gonna find out.

0:35:17.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Could you imagine if this was a… If the ants in this movie were fire ants?

[laughter]

0:35:22.1 Paul Meany: Would be cool. They wouldn’t… They’d be able to defend themselves. The problem with movies like this though, is using animals, is you kind of like you step into tropes and you kind of like start to act as if… Like, when we talk about, you know, all people are born free and equal, it’s because we’re all humans, we all have the same rights. But once you start having animals of different abilities and different sorts and all, the movie kind of like… A lot of different movies with animals almost justify the differences between them sometimes as if this is the way things are meant to be. And I find that very odd.

0:35:51.6 Landry Ayres: It’s kind of a social Darwinism angle. It’s very much like some people are made different, and they’re just, you know, faded to not be fit and to get… There are predators, and then there are prey.

0:36:05.0 Paul Meany: See, that’s Lion King. That’s what Lion King is about, but like ants life is about not giving into your nature and being something more than that.

0:36:11.9 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting though, because it… What you’re saying does… It is emblematic of what the film tries to get around, which is the idea that, you know, this sort of like American dream that people can break out of their roles and their species in the metaphor of animals and rise and anyone can make something of themselves like the seed metaphor that you talked about before. When in reality, the ant is always going to be an ant, and it has a role, and ant is not a male ant is not going to transcend and suddenly become the king ant that everyone celebrates. He’s gonna work, and then he’s gonna die. And I mean, yeah, you can read into that metaphor, and it might kill the movie and be like, well, you’re taking all of the fun away. But do we lose something in, in, in these metaphors like that? Or do we get fixed into certain ways of thinking, is like Natalie was talking about of viewing the ants simply as collectivists.

0:37:06.7 Natalie Dowzicky: I think too, like with… When you’re… When you do it in like animals or you’re like getting into the dynamics of their societies or bugs, for instance, I’m thinking to Bee Movie too, like the whole idea is that they’re using ants or they’re using bees to fight against like what we understand about ants and bees too though. Right? So like in Bee Movie, he like at… You know, they all get… They’re like on the little tram car, and they all get assigned their job. And it’s like, one person has like the little honey hat on his head and he like wipes the honey. The one person… Then like the upper class in the… In Bee Movie are the people that get to collect the pollen, right? And they’re like, like the buff bees, right.

0:37:44.0 Landry Ayres: They’re the top gun.

0:37:46.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right. They’re the… Yeah, they’re the top gun of…

0:37:47.0 Landry Ayres: Tom Cruise as a bee, do some Maverick fly out to collect honey? Yeah.

0:37:51.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Exactly. So… And like the whole idea behind that movie, too, is that like… I’m blanking on the main characters, the main bee’s name.

0:38:00.6 Paul Meany: Jerry Seinfeld.

0:38:01.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. But the actual bee’s name. Similar to how Flik is treated in A Bug’s Life, like he is trying to like break out of stereotypes and do something that like bees don’t do. Remember, he like wants to be a lawyer and like [laughter] which, again, great plot, but like it’s that… This idea of like, you’re not stuck in the hole, right. You’re not stuck doing with like… What the bee world or the ant world, whatever, has told you that you must do. And that, like you can challenge the rules or you can like challenge the playing field. And I think both of those movies have, like Paul said, that message. And I just think it’s… We do it with bugs because it’s more entertaining. ’cause like we can’t have that many human people, and that… I mean not human people, human movies that have this same message because then it’s not as good.

0:38:49.5 Landry Ayres: We can’t have that many human people. Natalie coming out in favor of population control. This has been Pop & Locke. Thank you so much for listening.

0:38:58.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Have more babies.

[laughter]

0:39:00.0 Landry Ayres: If that’s something that you feel comfortable with, yes, you should. I do want to ask.

0:39:06.4 Paul Meany: A Bug’s Life and Bee Movie were both kind of movies that didn’t like stick around long in the collective imagination. I think it’s ’cause people just… I don’t know, maybe the American dream kind of stuff, or like, say sorry, Bee Movie did stick around, before you say anything. It stuck around as a meme, but like the whole message of, you know…

0:39:21.9 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:39:22.0 Paul Meany: Be more than you are and everyone can do something. I think a lot of people are kind of like sick of that message and find it very trite and almost childish or naive. And so it’s kind of like ignored, and that’s why I don’t really see people talking about Bug’s Life a whole lot besides.

0:39:34.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I think the Bee Movie was essentially an updated version of Bug’s Life, right? So like in Bug’s Life, I feel like Flik is more like a… He is a hard worker in manufacturing, and they’re like, let’s make Bee Movie, and we’ll make him like a lawyer or like a news person or something, like they updated the work he was doing. I think they’re… I think they’re very similar movies. [laughter]

[music]

0:40:01.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more pop and lock content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop the letter N Locke with an E like the philosopher Pod. Make sure to follow us on apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.