His Job: Work Bugs Into the System

“I don’t know if people really understand what I do,” muses Joe Ranft, story supervisor of Disney/Pixar’s blockbuster hit, “A Bug’s Life.”

“When I say that I do story for animation, they say, ‘Oh, you’re a writer!’ If I tell them I’m kind of a writer, but I draw, they get this puzzled look. But when I say, ‘I’m the voice of Heimlich,’ the light bulb goes on and they say, ‘Oh, great!’ ”

Since the opening of the film, Ranft, 38, has received considerable media attention for his performance as the voice of Heimlich, the Bavarian caterpillar who dreams of becoming a “beautiful butterfly.” While he enjoys the notoriety, Ranft in fact spent most of the last three years at Pixar shaping the story of the film; voicing Heimlich was just a part-time gig.

The evolution of “A Bug’s Life” provides insight into the key behind-the-scenes role a story supervisor has in shaping an animated feature.

The idea for “Bug’s Life” grew out of a lunch Ranft had with the film’s co-director Andrew Stanton in 1994, “when it was pretty clear the story for ‘Toy Story’ was set and everyone was asking, ‘What’s next?’ ” Ranft recalls.

“We thought insects with their exoskeletons would be a natural idea for computer animation, but the only story we could think of was the Aesop’s fable about the ants and the grasshopper. We thought, ‘What if we took it further and made the grasshoppers the bad guys?’ It just sort of evolved from there.”

Ranft, Stanton, Jon Lasseter (director of “Toy Story” and “Bug’s Life”) and many other Pixar artists worked on both computer-animated films. But each of the films posed very different challenges.

“On ‘Toy Story,’ we could draw upon our own childhoods--we knew what a kid’s bedroom was, and we knew all the toys,” Ranft explains. “But in ‘A Bug’s Life,’ we had to invent what an ant colony is. We talked about making it a tribal culture, but we’d go off into stuff that sounded kind of bogus. We wanted it to feel familiar, so an audience could relate to it.

“In this one [“Bug’s Life”], we bit off a bigger scenario. There are 10 characters in the circus, eight major ant characters and two major grasshopper characters, and they all interact. I’d like to have seen more of Manny and Gypsy [the praying mantis and his moth assistant in the flea circus], who are really rich characters. But if you have a funny thing with each character in every scene, it really slows the movie down and makes it hard to keep the story in balance. We’re a little crowded, just in terms of having 20 main characters to deal with when we have 80 minutes to tell our story.”

Telling stories, in one form or another, is Ranft’s lifelong passion. A native of Whittier, Ranft’s early interests included movies, drawing, performing in school plays and doing sleight-of-hand magic.

“I liked evoking a response from an audience through the illusion of magic,” he says. “Animation is the ultimate illusion, the illusion of life: These characters don’t really exist; we create the illusion of a character.”

Ranft entered the character animation program at California Institute of the Arts in fall 1978. His classmates included director Tim Burton and Mark Henn, who animated the title character in Disney’s recent “Mulan.” While at CalArts, Ranft was inspired by a series of storyboards from the 1946 Disney feature “Song of the South,” drawn by Bill Peet, who is generally regarded as the best of the studio’s story men.

“His [Peet’s] pastel drawings were so alive they just knocked me over. Even though they were just still drawings, they screamed to be animated,” Ranft says. “I knew that’s what I wanted to try to accomplish.”

Ranft left CalArts for Disney in 1980. Although his first five years were “devoted to projects that never got made,” he quickly established a reputation as one of the leaders of a new generation of story artists. He worked on “Oliver & Company” (1988), “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) and “The Little Mermaid” (1989), and served as head of story on “The Rescuers Down Under” (1990).

At Disney, Ranft struck up a friendship with Lasseter. Their paths diverged when they left the studio--Lasseter went to Pixar in Northern California to direct a series of innovative computer-animated shorts, while Ranft wrote a children’s book and did story work on Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) and “James and the Giant Peach” (1996). But they stayed in contact: “John and I had a pact that when he directed his first feature, I was going to work on it,” he recalls. Ranft came to Pixar to serve as story supervisor on “Toy Story” (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature.

As story supervisor, Ranft draws storyboards, which originated at the Disney Studio in 1933 as a way of bringing order to the often chaotic process of creating an animated film. A storyboard consists of a series of drawings and lines of dialogue pinned to a large corkboard panel. The artists add, remove or rearrange the drawings as the sequence takes shape. The boards provide filmmakers with a way of previewing each scene visually before it moves into production.

In live-action filmmaking, actors can experiment with different attitudes and ways of reading a line on the set. For an animated film, the storyboard artists explore those possibilities in their drawings before the actual animation begins--it’s not unusual for a sequence to be boarded eight, 10 or even 12 times.

“I’ve never really boarded live action, but from what I’ve seen, live-action storyboard people solve logistical problems for the director,” Ranft notes. “By thinking out sequences, they can see how many setups they need and budget accordingly. On ‘Roger Rabbit,’ they knew there were certain streets in L.A. they could shoot from certain angles and the buildings would all be in period: The artists did the storyboards with those angles in mind.”

In addition to his work on “A Bug’s Life,” Ranft has been teaching classes in storyboarding at Pixar, and he proudly notes that five of his students are now working full time on the sequel “Toy Story II,” slated for release next year. But after making four movies in five years, he’s looking forward to a few months off, then going back to work with Lasseter, developing the story for the next feature.

Unlike many story artists, Ranft says he has no interest in directing. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, you’re just going to keep storyboarding,’ ” he says with a laugh. “My answer is, ‘Yes, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and I want to get better at it.’ ”