Headscratchers / A Bug's Life

Headscratchers for A Bug's Life.

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The Bird Is The Word

• An in-story use against the grasshoppers: that type of bird is not nocturnal.
  • It could've been woken up by the disturbances near its nest.
    • But wouldn't said bird just go back to sleep instead of charging down at whatever woke it up?
    • Maybe it fancied a snack.
    • Or more correctly, its kids did.
    • If something woke you up, wouldn't you decide to get rid of it somehow before trying to go back to sleep so it couldn't wake you up again? Her feeding it to her chicks was a way of doing this while keeping them fed.
  • Hopper doesn't strike me as the sort to bother learning that.

Giddyup, Centipede!

• Would it not have made more sense to use centipedes (which are notoriously fast) as P.T. Flea's "horse" and the much-more-legged millipedes as massage therapists, as opposed to the reverse?
  • Rule of Funny and many people cannot tell them apart at a glance.
  • Plus, millipedes tend to be bigger, making them more convenient to ride on.
  • Also, they're pulling a heavy wagon, and when pulling/carrying heavy loads, raw power or torque (when you have wheels, at least) is more useful than speed, and millipedes are actually stronger than centipedes. It's kind of like how a semi truck usually can't go faster than a sports car or how a cargo plane usually can't go faster than a fighter jet, but in both cases, the former can carry more than the latter.

No Reason For Bullying

• Is it just me or does Hopper seem to be bullying the ants for no reason at all? He makes such a big deal about "keeping the ants in line", even though the grasshoppers have more than enough food to stay in Mexico, where they'll never see the ants again. Is Hopper such a Card-Carrying Villain that he has to go out of his way to terrorize a bunch of ants that'll never leave their island to bother him?
  • At one point he calls it "their way of life". That's just what grasshoppers do, enslave lower insects.
  • His speech with the grains more or less sums up why he does it; he wants to keep their spirits crushed so that they never even think about rebelling.
  • And it's not that they have enough food to stay in Mexico forever, just for another year or so. Sooner or later, they'd need to go rob the ants again.
    • Exactly - they must keep up this intimidation yearly, otherwise it would wear off.
  • I believe Hopper's gang did originally need the food but by the time of the film, the gang had controlled the ants for so long that they had a bountiful stockpile. This is why some grasshoppers did ask to not return later on yet were loyal to the cause earlier in the film. Also as history has showed, even if colonies are not necessary, an emperor still wants their territories intact to stay powerful. Ant slavery also would have benefits for the grasshoppers even if food wasn't an issue.
    • A line early on in the film implies that the ants and the grasshoppers struck some sort of deal with each other, lending support to this idea.
  Hopper: Listen, if you can't keep up your end of the bargain, then I can't guarantee your safety and there are insects out there that will take advantage of you!
  • Hopper's a bully. Bullies pick on people for no reason.

Angry for Stupid Reasons

• Why is the Ant colony so mad at Flik? Ok, he lied to them all about the bird, but it was to compensate for a mistake of finding circus bugs instead of warriors (a mistake the circus bugs unwittingly played a part in too). Flik has good intentions, and wants to benefit his colony. There's a difference between lying to cover your own ass, and lying to keep people's hopes up in a situation where doubt is the enemy.
  • As far as they were concerned, he got their hopes up too high that the ants could overthrow the grasshoppers for good. To be fair, they never liked him in the first place and were more than happy to get rid of him (especially after he destroyed their food stockpile and unleashed Hopper's wrath on them), so this could have been a very easy excuse to get rid of him for good.
  • Part of it is because of the lie and him getting circus performers instead of people who could actually help them against the grasshoppers, but once the lie was revealed the ants probably saw it as Flik having wasted valuable time that could have been spent on gathering food for the offering. Basically, "Thanks a lot, Flik, your screw-ups have put us way behind on something that would actually get the grasshoppers off our backs."

Recycling the Stockpile

• I know that Hopper asked the food to be doubled because the original stockpile fell into a puddle. However, remember that the Ant colony is on an island technically, with a stream that can be crossed during droughts. Since droughts are possible, doesn't that mean the puddle that had the food would dry out and that food could be used again? And even if a drought wouldn't dry it out, building a dam would- it would require much less resources than the many months the ants used to farm the new stockpile.
  • It's possible that either the water ruined the food, or that they did recover the food and their difficulty was finding more food on top of that.
    • Bugs don't give a crap about if their food is soggy, they would eat almost anything. Did you forget the Poo-Poo Platter?
    • The grain and berries would go bad if they were wet. That's the problem.
  • The only person who knows exactly what happened to the food is Flik. As far as Hopper knows, the ants might have just decided to keep all the food for themselves. In any case, Hopper isn't really bothered about the food, he's worried about the ants realizing that they outnumber the grasshoppers and rebelling (he literally spells this out in his "grain" speech). His demand is a deliberate Disproportionate Retribution in order to keep the ants demoralized and under his control.
    • It's even more than that. Hopper initially only asked for a new stockpile after what happened to the old one, but doubled up on it after Flik stood up to him, triggering his fear of the rest of the colony following suit and rebelling against him and his gang. And as we see in the colony scene where the ants are struggling with the do-over, Thorny notes that there's likely not enough food to meet the double quota. And given that this is summer time, it's highly unlikely any more food will have grown during that time. As such later, when they scramble to fill the order after aborting the bird plan and banishing Flik and the troupe, but only come up with a mediocre amount of food, he points out that while there is more food on the island, if they give up anymore than they've offered already, the colony will starve that winter. Hopper deliberately set a demand that he knew the ants couldn't meet, at least not without endangering themselves, and that when it came down to it, they would reluctantly choose to prioritize their own survival over pleasing him, which gave him the perfect excuse to take over the island, force the colony to give up their winter storage of food, and then publicly assassinate their Queen in order to break them into to complete and utter submission to his gang.
  • What do bugs use for money?
• Francis and the Blueberry Scouts are shown using playing poker with seeds, but seeds are pretty common and they might have not been real money since the kids are too young to own any.

Grasshoppers Rule The Colony

• How exactly did those grasshoppers manage to dominate that ant colony? Ant colonies are known for being extremely protective of their queen and their offspring. If a grasshopper so much as set foot in their territory, they would immediately get swarmed and torn apart as well as eaten (since ants are omnivores). Those ants Hopper was bullying around were still quite large, with twenty being enough to take him down. Most grasshoppers who find themselves smack dab in the middle of an ant colony will try do everything in their power to escape from it as far as possible. Is that the reason Hopper was so intent on dominating them, as a way of conquering a great fear?
  • It's only the almost all-female, six-legged, compound-eyed ants that are that vicious. In other words, the real ones.
  • It's implied early in the film that the grasshoppers and the ants struck some sort of bargain with each other, with the ants gathering food for the grasshoppers and the grasshoppers keeping out any undesirable elements—likely other insects looking to take advantage of the ants as well, if what Hopper says is true. This would explain why Hopper seems slightly more cordial toward the Queen before he turns on her in the climax (wouldn't be easy to conduct business negotiations with someone if you're threatening to murder them and all) as well as being an excellent method of harkening back to the film's roots in the classical Aesop's fable.
  • The film may be seen as a sequel to Aesop's fable - specifically the variant where the ants help the grasshopper. Next year the grasshopper brought his family along... and things went downhill from there (although if that was the case, it would be an extremely Hard Truth Aesop).
  • The grasshoppers are basically the Mafia in this circumstance, offering "protection" to the ants in exchange for food.
  • I'm pretty sure even in real life, a grasshopper can easily kill ONE ANT with a single kick. Hopper must have made an example out of quite a few ants enough to disillusion them in how much they outnumber the grasshoppers.

The Circus Hunt

• Why was P.T. specifically searching for the circus bugs at ant hills? He wasn't there to see Flik find them.
  • He may have asked around and found out about it (there were other witnesses around, so word of mouth would likely have been a source).

The Food Offering

• Why did the ants think that it would be a good idea to keep the food elevated on rocks on the cliff side where any simple accident could cause it to tumble off the edge? Furthermore, why did they do it again after the food spilled the first time?
  • Make it easier to spot from the air maybe? It's clear they don't want the grasshoppers there any longer than they need to be there so they're going to want to take any measure they can to stop the grasshoppers hunting around for the offering. Plus the grasshoppers have almost certainly gotten used to seeing it there, so any deviation is not going to be met well.
  • Going along with the offering always being in that specific spot, it's possible that they've never had any issues with the setup before. The accident that caused the food to fall over the edge was caused by the stalk launcher of Flik's harvester going off, which probably has a lot more power behind it than any kind of accident the ants could have realistically caused.

Dot's Search for Flik

• How did Dot know where to find Flik and the circus bugs after they left the island? She didn't know where they were going, and never had set foot off Ant Island before.
  • They couldn't have gone that far in the time since they left, and Dot does know how to fly now. If she flew up high enough, it wouldn't be hard to spot an animal-cracker box being towed along by a pair of centipedes.

Tuck or Roll?

• How can you tell the pillbug twins Tuck & Roll apart?
  • Tuck is the one with a unibrow, Roll has regular eyebrows

Grasshoppers own Grasshoppers

• Why is there a weird, animalistic Grasshopper? I understand why they use him to help intimidate the Ants, but where did he come from? Why is he so animalistic compared to the other Grasshoppers?
  • Think of him like a grasshopper version of Sloth.
  • I think that the idea is that he's a grasshopper with some kind of mental illness that makes him exceptionally aggressive and animalistic.
  • It could also be an act and said grasshopper is merely pretending to be a raving animal to help Hopper with his intimidation of the ants. This is supported by the events of the film if one looks closely. In all the scenes involving the ants, he acts like a madman on a leash, but during the scenes at the resort place, he is acting perfectly normal and not at all like an animal or a madman.

Insectonomics

• Okay, so the grasshoppers have a system where if the ants (who, presumably, if the grasshoppers weren't getting involved, would probably just collect food for themselves without exporting or importing anything) give them food every so often, they don't attack the ants, and it's mentioned that this has been going on so long that extorting and subjugating the ants has become a way of life and an end in and of itself even though there are other ways they could get food without this whole shakedown. Here's what I'm wondering:
  • There's a whole economy where bugs can order food at restaurants and presumably also buy it in stores, and the grasshoppers themselves (seem to) participate in it because they go to a bar, with the only reason they go back to harass the ants for more food being that this has basically become routine for them. Did the grasshoppers extorting the ants become too ingrained in their lifestyle for them to stop before or after this economy arose, and if it was around back when the main concern was food instead of power, why didn't the grasshoppers back then try to do something to get MONEY which they could then get food with instead of just harassing what amounts to a farm in the middle of nowhere to get food directly? Yeah, the grasshopper in the original story was a total freeloader, but THESE grasshoppers seem to be putting in a lot of a whole different kind of work to keep the ants in line, and with the urban economy would come a number of jobs they could do that wouldn't be as hard as the ants' subsistence farming. Even disregarding regular work (you know how sometimes biker gangs do security at concerts? Maybe the biker-gang-like grasshoppers could do that or something like it), who's to say they couldn't, say, try zany get-rich-quick schemes or rob other bugs of their MONEY instead of their food?
  • The ultimate answer to this question is that we simply don't know enough about how this insect world works to get any kind of straight answer, all we can do is guess. Based on what's seen in the film, the economics of this world seems to work on a region-by-region basis, with some regions having an economy due to a large population of bugs of differing species interacting with one another, while other regions, like the area where the ants live, don't have any kind of economy because of a lower population whose residents tend to keep to themselves and/or their own kind and generally don't interact much with other species. It's unknown if these economic areas have always existed or if they are relatively new. As for why the grasshoppers insist on taking food from the ants, it's implied, based on what Hopper says in the beginning of the film, that the ants and grasshoppers made some kind of deal in the past in which the grasshoppers would protect the ants from outside bugs harassing them (whether or not there were any actual bugs harassing them is not known) in exchange for the ants giving them a portion of their food. Then, at some point in time, the original deal simply became a means of exploiting the ants for free food. If the insect economy didn't exist back when this deal was first made, then the grasshoppers are essentially conservatives who don't want to adapt to a new lifestyle. If the economy did exist back when the deal was made, then the grasshoppers are basically a criminal gang operating a Protection Racket so that they could have food without needing to actually work for a living.

Did you think this through Flik?

• An earlier draft of the movie revealed that the Circus bugs were planning to take the ants of their food after getting rid of the grasshoppers, thus making the whole thing redundant for the ants since they'd just trade one rat for another. While it's understandable that this was dropped, it does leave me questioning why Flik was hoping to find tough bugs to help fight of the grasshoppers in the first place if he (and his colony by extension) weren't really offering anything in return. If you ask a total stranger for a favor, they'd usually say "What's in it for me?" Princess Atta wasn't expecting Flik to succeed in recruiting anyone, and only sent him on the "search" to keep him out from underfoot. So there wasn't gonna be any of ants resources offered. Long story short, what was Flik gonna do if he couldn't find an potential volunteers?

Heimlich getting stuck

When he gets stuck distracting the bird and almost gets eaten, why didn't he suck himself in as he does right after when Gypsy distracts the bird.

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