The Big Picture In its almost 30-year history of creating high-class animated features, Pixar has practically built its entire studio identity on telling enthralling stories from unexpected points of view. Their films have been able to create engaging pathos and thoughtful world building by telling stories of how the perspectives of toys, fish, and even abstract emotions are shaped by the bigger world around them.
While it has nearly reached parodic levels of how often Pixar gives life to objects, creatures, and even the elements themselves, exploring the perspectives of various concepts has proved itself a limitless well of storytelling potential for the studio. This philosophy helped create not only some of the studio’s most insightful tales and imaginative moments, but also one of the most terrifying moments in Pixar's animated canon.
'A Bug's Life' Showed a Terrifying View from a Bug's Eye As only Pixar’s second feature film after Toy Story, 1998’s A Bug's Life was “an epic of miniature proportions” that chronicled the struggle between an industrious ant colony and a gang of grasshopper mobsters who abuse the meek ants’ productivity to supply themselves with food every year.
Aside from the grasshoppers themselves, the film's most ominous threat is that of a simple bird, which from the perspective of the film’s cast of bugs, becomes a horrifying monster. The Bird first appears in the scene where optimistic inventor Flik is trying to convince the gang of circus bugs he mistook for warriors to stay and help defend his colony from the grasshoppers.
On paper, a bird feeding a grasshopper to a nest of hatchlings is far from a horrific sight and is common in nature, but the way A Bug’s Life establishes the scope of its world and the perspective of its minuscule characters makes it a terrifying scene. The film’s most fear-inducing moments being brought on by a simple bird demonstrates how Pixar, even at the beginning of its legendary lineage, was able to offer audiences a fresh perspective on something they typically overlook.