Designing Bugs Simultaneously
"We started with the notion that bugs are the largest single species of creatures; they make up more than 80% of all the things that move around the Earth," said Rothschild. "In developing the story, we realized that most people see bugs as being pests. So we got together with a team of top entomologists and asked them if they had eight minutes in which to tell a story about bugs, what would be the three most important things that could be said."

The response that the WDI team received was that without bugs, we could not exist. The entomologists wanted to see an attraction that would make human visitors, young and old, not only look at bugs as either beautiful like butterflies or amazing in what they can do, like ants, but also appreciated for their incredible contributions to the environment. In other words, without the crawling Dung Beetle that eats waste or the buzzing bee that pollinates plants and crops, we humans would have a hard time surviving.

"Knowing the story that we wanted to tell, we were also aware of the fact that Pixar was developing the movie A Bug's Life, starring Flik the Ant and Hopper the Grasshopper," said Rothschild. "We thought if we could bring those characters in to tell our story, that would be great."

At that time, Pixar was in the early process of development which presented some additional challenges for the production team. "The Disney organization was getting the animatronics to work with Pixar, who was doing the animation of Flik and Hopper. Rhythm and Hues, who won an Academy Award for Babe, did all the other bugs and backgrounds," said Rothschild. "We needed to bring all those people together with the Disney forces to create a seamless experience for the audience member. Only at this time, Pixar was not very far in the process. In fact, they did not have one solid animation of Hopper and we needed to begin building this eight foot animated figure of him for the attraction. I think this might be the only time that the attraction for a film was built before the film was done. It made it very interesting at times," he added.

For the Disney animatronics team there were some very special problems when creating the moving figures to accent the 3D animated film. First, the animatronic characters are seen by the audience just before the film begins. "Creating the animated figure of Hopper was a big new step in terms of the fact that he is certainly the most sophisticated figure we have done to date for a couple of reasons, one being his scale," said Rothschild. "We are talking about a grasshopper that is eight feet tall and he has to move like he does on film and in real-life."

The challenge for the team is that the audience sees him one minute in the theater as an animatronic and then thirty seconds later animated on screen. The animatronic figure needed to move and walk in a manner so that the audience would believe that Hopper had moved from the stage to the screen.

Flik presented similar challenges in that the audience finds a blue hued ant in the ceiling of the theater (within the roots and substructure of the Tree of Life, a very appropriate place for an ant to hang out) and then five seconds later, he also walks into the film. "The whole approach to the way we developed the faces to articulate when compared against the animation film's articulation was a challenge which I think we delivered well on," said Rothschild.

Another bug for the designers to work out was in placing the mechanical workings of the animatronics into the thin limbs that are characteristic of an insect, and then getting him to take his place quickly, appearing almost like magic before the audience. "Hopper has to go from not being seen to being seen in less than two seconds and it is almost a feat of magic and an extraordinary thing to watch with the lights on," said Rothschild. "To me that is a real tribute to thirty plus years of learning and a tremendous continued tenacity on the part of the guys and gals who build these figures and say, `We may have never done this before but we think maybe we can' and then they do it!"