second film, we'd make it.
The bigger fear was just, can you find
that lightning in a bottle again?
Can you make yourself as in love
the second time around,
and you realize you have
to actually work now
at making yourself as naive
as you were in the first round
without any effort.
There's nothing worse than any artist
facing their second
big piece of work, right?
'Cause it's the point
at which you find out whether
everything that's been written
about you is just hype,
and you're yesterday's news,
or whether you maybe
really are the real deal.
One of the things I learned is
the tricks that worked on the last movie
don't necessarily work on this movie.
You know, you think,
"Oh, we made Toy Sfory.
"This is good. Oh, we know how. . .
What we're doing now!"
And then you start on a movie
like Bug's Life,
and you're back in kindergarten again.
LASSETER: Research was
literally done
out in front of Pixar,
in our own backyard.
We ordered this tiny
little video camera.
We called it the bug-cam,
and put it on the end of a stick.
And we put little wheels from Lego
on the bottom of it,
and we were able to wheel it around
and literally look at things
from a half an inch above the ground.
The one thing we noticed
from this bug-cam
was how translucent everything was.
It was breathtaking.
(INSECTS BUZZING)
NARRATOR: For their second film
with Disney,
Pixar set out to prove
themselves again,
with a bigger story, scope
and organic characters.
Here I go. For the colony!
And for oppressed ants everywhere!
NARRATOR:  A Bug's Life was the first
computer-animated
wide-screen movie.
Oh. The city!
I represent a colony of ants,
and I'm looking for tough bugs.
You know, mean bugs.
The sort of bugs. . .
A talent scout!
My colony's in trouble!
Grasshoppers are coming.
We've been forced to prepare
all this food !
-Dinner theater!
-Food !
Please! Will you help us?
This is it! This is Ant Island !
DOT: Flik! Over here! Flik! Flik!
They seem to relish the idea, at Pixar,
of doing something difficult
and then seeing
how to solve the problems
in a creative and entertaining way.
What did you do?
It was an accident?
ANDERSON: There's
always something
that we haven't invented yet.
So, as a producer,
you are trusting a lot of R&D
to come through in the right time.
And you're pushing a lot of things
and you're gambling
and you're looking at people's eyes
and you're saying,
"Can you do this for me?"
LASSETER: It was just a giant story.
Too many characters,
too much going on
and we were just drowning
in this thing.
ANDERSON: So the producer goes to
John and says,
"John, we technologically
cannot do crowd shots
"with more than 50 ants in them.
"So can you design the movie
around this limitation?"
And he said, "I'm willing to accept that
if that's all you can do,
"but I think you guys can do better. "
So he helped formulate
this crowd team.
He believed in them, he pushed them
and at the end of the day,
they were the heroes of the movie.
You ants stay back!
NARRATOR: Through new
technological advancements,
Pixar artists transformed
50 original crowd shots into 431 ,
and brought an epic of
miniature proportions to the screen.
Pixar broke through
the second film syndrome
and A Bug's Life became
the highest-grossing
animated film of 1 998.
After directing two back-to-back films,
John returned home from
the international promotional tour,
now ready for a much-needed break.
I was exhausted.
My family hadn't seen much of me
and we were going
to take the summer off.
Coming down the home stretch
of Bug's Life,
we were all feeling stressed.
And, you know,
we had been sharing John a lot.
As a family, you know,
we needed some family time.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, a secondary
production team at Pixar
was making a direct-to-video
sequel ofTot Story ,
the first project not
supervised by John Lasseter.
In February 1 998,
Disney decided to release