A Bug’s Life v Antz: How It Happened

Every now and then in movie history, two movies with very similar plots are released close to other. Like in 2011 with  Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, in 1998 Armageddon and Deep Impact, in 2013 Olympus has Fallen and White House Down and, to a lesser extent, Titanic and Speed 2: Cruise Control. But how is it that two studios happened to release an animated movie about misfit ants in the same year? Well, the story is still a little unclear but this very question would go on to start a long-running feud between two animation studios that were just in their infancy.

Of course, we’re talking about 1998’s release of Pixar Animation Studios second film, A Bug’s Life and DreamWorks’ first animated feature, Antz. We recently recorded our A Bug’s Life review episode for Two Drink Cinema and this brought up a whole lot of questions about this feud on its 25^th anniversary.

So how did these two stories originate?

Hollywood legend has it that at a lunch in 1994 with Pixar’s John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Doctor and Joe Ranft, the storyline for A Bug’s Life was born (along with a number of other future Pixar projects including Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Wall-E). Meanwhile, Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks have always maintained that Antz originated from scripts Katzenberg had seen when he was at Disney Animation. Before Katzenberg was ousted from Disney, he was shown a script for a movie called Army Ants. This would apparently go on to become the lesser of the two features, Antz.

In 1998, John Lasseter told Business Week that he had told Katzenberg about the plans for A Bug’s Life back in 1995 as well as its projected 1998 release. During this talk, Katzenberg commented that DreamWorks was planning to launch its first title, The Prince of Egypt, at that exact same time. Later, Lasseter and Pixar found out about the existence of Antz and Lasseter called Katzenberg to confront him about this strange coincidence. According to Lasseter, Katzenberg ranted about how Disney had a conspiracy against him (Katzenberg having been previously caught up in a legal dispute with Disney).

Initially, Antz was scheduled to premiere in March of 1999, four months after A Bug’s Life. Katzenberg went on to push up the release date to October 1998, a move that ensured Antz would now be the first DreamWorks Animation title in history (with The Prince of Egypt now delayed to December 1998) and, more importantly, be the first of the two bug movies to be released. 

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Pixar at the time, claimed that Katzenberg phoned both himself and Lasseter with an offer to halt all work on Antz if Pixar would move the release date of A Bug’s Life, and ensure that The Prince of Egypt would be the big animated family movie of the 1998 holiday season. Of course, history now shows us that this was an offer they could refuse, and Antz continued with its planned October release date. 

This back-and-forth between the studios, as well as Lasseter and Jobs going public with their thoughts on DreamWorks and Katzenberg, has now contributed to making this huge feud over tiny bugs the stuff of Hollywood legend. 

Pixar has gone on to be seen an artsy pioneer for computer animation with a string of box office hits that combine stunning visuals, witty jokes and deeper content that even adults have enjoyed and at times brought adult viewers to tears (we’re looking at you Up and Toy Story 3). DreamWorks Animation is no failure by any means, with huge movies and franchises including Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar, but they may always be seen as the lesser of the two studios and it all started 25 years ago with two movies about misfit bugs.