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On a tiny island dominated by one large tree, a colony of ants gather their yearly midsummer grain offering to appease a marauding grasshopper gang led by the ferocious Hopper. Worker-ant Flik, while demonstrating his new grain-harvesting contraption, accidentally dumps the offering into deep water. An incensed Hopper demands the ants provide twice their usual offering by the time the last leaf falls from the tree. Flik offers to get help from bigger bugs in the mainland city (a rubbish pile). Princess Atta, training to take over from her mother the Queen, agrees to let him go.

In the city, a troupe of circus bugs are fired by their ringmaster P. T. Flea after a disastrous performance. Flik sees them fighting with some flies and mistakes them for warriors, while they mistake him for a talent scout. Flik leads them back to the island. When the misunderstanding is clarified, the circus bugs try to leave, but stop to help save Atta's sister Dot from a hungry bird. Flik is inspired: he persuades the colony and the bugs to build a fake bird to scare off the grasshoppers. But when Flik realises that no one expected him to succeed, he leaves with the circus bugs whom Flea has rehired. The grasshoppers arrive, intending to squish the Queen. Dot finds Flik and persuades him to return. Flik's fake-bird plan partly succeeds until the bird catches fire. Flik stands up to Hopper and makes the ants realise that they vastly outnumber the grasshoppers. The ants attack en masse, Hopper battles Flik, but is tricked into falling into the clutches of a real bird and is eaten by its chicks. The circus bugs set off, leaving behind Flik, now considered a hero by the colony.

Insects have an impressive employment record in animation. In 1909, Ladislaw Starewicz experimented with animating dead stag beetles, eventually featuring them in Cameraman's Revenge (a 1911 variation on the Bride Retires cycle of voyeuristic films), one so convincing critics were amazed that Starewicz had managed to train his tiny cast so well. Animation pioneers the Fleischer Brothers made Mr Bug Goes to Town (1941), a great film maudit which features a colony of urban insects whose home is threatened by the inexorable forces of property development. This was their second unsuccessful attempt (after Gulliver's Travels in Lilliput, 1939) to mount a viable alternative to Disney's monopoly on animated features.

It's tempting to make parallels with the current battle between DreamWorks SKG and Disney circa 1998. DreamWorks, who released their own wisecracking, New York-set ant movie Antz a few months ago, might seem plucky inheritors of the Fleischers' upstart-underdog title if they were not themselves so efficient, canny and corporate. Still, history is repeating itself in the sense that Disney has the upper hand with this co-production (with Pixar) of A Bug's Life - traditionally bucolic, better executed, more tightly constructed and more commercially successful. This latest insect movie uses the same basic plot structure as Antz: a colony threatened by other more powerful insects is saved by ostracised members' ingenuity. A Bug's Life burrows a little less deeply into the muddy individual-versus-conformity soil ploughed by Antz. It's a far lighter film - literally so, with much more of its action taking place above ground rather than inside the anthill (which in Antz made a wonderfully murky, Metropolis-like setting).

It's no accident, though, that an anglepoise (star of award-winning short Luxo Jr.) is Pixar's mascot. Subtle use of light and colour has emerged as director John Lasseter and Co's trademark and their deployment of these elements in A Bug's Life is quite astounding. Where the last film, Toy Story, was set mainly indoors and afforded opportunities to mimic incandescent lighting and sunlight filtered through windows, A Bug's Life goes for an even more complex palette of effects. As the summer wanes and autumn kicks in, the shades darken and the angles of illumination change almost imperceptibly. In this arena, computers really can achieve things cell animation would struggle to get right; it's a matter of mathematical programming to calculate shadows from preset sources. A kind of lapidary realism is generated that would have equally impressed those fooled by Starewicz's stag beetles.

Nonetheless, the film's makers are canny enough to realise the value of stylisation. A Bug's Life really has the edge over Antz in the graphic simplicity of its characterisation. Where Antz made things harder for itself with anatomically correct six-legged ants given almost human-proportioned faces, Pixar's film takes an opposite strategy, reducing faces to huge, white-filled eyes and giving the ant bodies only four limbs. Meanwhile, the grasshoppers (their relentless leader Hopper wittily voiced by Kevin Spacey) have a lobster-shell texture, their joints constantly clicking menacingly, forming a sharp contrast with the soft, incandescent burnish on the pastel-coloured ants. Little of it will wash with entomologists, but A Bug's Life achieves the aim of reducing the squirm factor inherent in having insect protagonists. Nevertheless, the script has fun playing with our common knowledge of insects. The film's best line is a bored fly at the circus dismissing the bugs' performance with, "I only have 24 hours to live and I'm not wasting it on this." This fly would be less likely to say this of the film in which he appears. The rest of the film has similar fun mixing bug-world givens with anthropomorphism.

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