Dreamin' of A Bug's Life

When co-directors John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton released their CGI-animated feature film A Bug’s Life in 1998, they had no idea the impact their story, about a misfit ant set on recruiting warriors to save his colony from invading grasshoppers, would have on my daughter’s life.

"Daddy, Daddy! Guess what I dreamed about last night?"

"I have absolutely no idea. What?"

"A Bug’s Life!"

"Again? Sheesh. All you do is dream about A Bug’s Life. What happened last night?"

"We were flying on Flik’s dandelion seed."

"Was I there?"

"Of course not Daddy. You’re not an ant."

Every day, in her talk, in her play, and in her very sleep, A Bug’s Life was the constant for my young daughter. All I ever heard was Flik this and Princess that. The villainous grasshopper leader, Hopper (voiced by Kevin Spacey), was around every corner!

"Daddy, daddy! Guess what I dreamed about last night?"

"I couldn’t possibly."

"We were looking for other ants somewhere in the world, because they were lost. And we were trying to find them!"

"That sounds like fun. Why were they lost?"

"Because they were afraid of the grasshoppers. But Molt, he’s not that scary. They just thought he was."

I realized that there had to be more to the dreams than a simply fascination with a cool movie; something about this story was entering deep into my daughter’s heart.

As James Earl Jones once said, "One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter," and so our hearts talks to us in dreams. What lives there, deep down inside, doesn’t easily exist in our physical world, but our heart longs to tell us about it, and so it does so through our dreams. Unfortunately, something is always lost in the translation. With most of us, it’s damn near impossible to understand our hearts’ true desires.

My daughter’s name has two similar meanings: White Dove and Bird of Peace. We had expected a boy, so when I finally got home, at 12:30 in the morning, the day she was born, I immediately jumped on the computer and spent three hours scouring the internet for names. I printed off fifteen pages worth. In the end we decided on a name that was perfect, and chosen because of the vision that we have for her: she’s going to bring God’s peace to people. That is what we truly believe. What sort of future this will look like exactly, I have no idea, but as time passes, a vision is beginning to form.

In the climax to A Bug’s Life (my daughter’s favourite part of the entire film), the ants finally forget their fears regarding the invading grasshoppers and stand up to them. Hopper has always known that if the ants got together, the grasshoppers wouldn’t stand a chance, and so he and his crew have kept the ants afraid. The ants never know peace until they get fed up, band together and throw the grasshoppers out.

This narrative is, of course, not unique to the movies. Throughout human history, there has never been peace without some sort of a fight to remove oppression. As Gandhi said, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it — always."

Oppression needs to be fought today, just as it will tomorrow, just as it will the day after that. There will always be Hoppers. "The heart has reasons that reason does not understand" (Bossuel), and my daughter’s heart is speaking to her of her future, in more truthful tones than ever could be written in our realm, using the images of dreams to convey what is really going on.

Yes, there will always be Hoppers, but my daughter is not having nightmares about them.

"So, tell me what you dreamed about last night."

"Hopper."

"Ohhhh. Were you scared?"

"Noooooo. Why would I be scared of Hopper? I’m an ant!"

© 2008 Darren Stoltz; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.