In the 1998 Pixar movie A Bug’s Life, the members of a colony of
hardworking ants are routinely bullied into giving most of their
carefully collected food to a thuggish grasshopper and his cronies.
Decades earlier, Disney presented another story about diligent ants and a
lazy grasshopper. In the 1934 Silly Symphony The Grasshopper and the Ants,
the larger insect is not cruel, just irresponsible. Though the ants
warn him to prepare for the harsh winter weather to come, he continues
on his merry way until he is forced to concede that they are right and
that he should have spent some of his time getting ready.
The
book version of Disney’s take on this ancient fable was written by
Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Larry Moore. The paintings have a
drab and rather fuzzy look about them. It certainly looks like a
throwback to an earlier time in animation. The grasshopper is a jolly
soul with bright, enormous eyes and a wide smile. He wears a red shirt
and a green jacket that matches his green top hat, and he plays his
fiddle merrily, inviting anyone he meets to join in his revelry. The
ants are a bit less distinctive; they are black with brown legs, and
many of them wear no clothes at all. Those who do mostly wear only a hat
or bow; the queen in her regal pink gown and golden crown is the only
one fully dressed.
In the original version of the story, after
the grasshopper fails to heed the warnings of the ants, winter catches
him by surprise and he appeals to the well-stocked ants for mercy,
asking them for food and shelter, but they coldly turn him away. The
moral appears to be that it is best to prepare for lean times instead of
spending all your days goofing off, but the ants’ lack of charity
rankles, so it’s hard to really see their industry as a great virtue
under the circumstances.
In Disney’s version, the ants have
more sympathy for their foolish friend, so instead of simply leaving him
out in the cold to freeze and starve to death, they invite him in and
he has the opportunity to repent, make amends and turn over a new leaf.
In the original version, I think that while the grasshopper is too
lackadaisical, the ants are too harsh. Disney offers a better balance,
showing that it is important to work hard but that life is also to be
enjoyed and that kindness to one’s neighbors is as high a virtue as
dedicated self-sufficiency.
The Disney short includes a song
that the grasshopper sings, and that appears in the book as well, though
of course, you have to imagine the melody as he sings. The World Owes Me a Living
is the name of the song, and it’s rather obnoxious, at least until he
changes his tune. The lyrics were written by Larry Morey, but most of
the words in the book are Brown’s. A prolific writer of children’s
books, she moves the story along artfully, a few sentences at a time.
The narration and dialogue is set apart in brown boxes, with the
illustrations either taking up a full page or a large portion of the
page, set against a white backdrop.
With the new year upon us,
we are now in the midst of the winter in which this book concludes, or
at least I am in Pennsylvania. I can never quite decide if I am the
grasshopper or the ant. I’d like to think I have a pretty decent work
ethic and that I manage my resources wisely, but I also spend a lot of
time in leisurely pursuits. I think the key is to stick to neither
extreme. Be more like the cricket, known for its merry music but
associated with the making of sound moral decisions. In the end, in this
more optimistic version of Aesop’s classic, the grasshopper comes to
appreciate the value of hard work and the ants recognize the worth of
merrymaking. All of them are able to appreciate that giving of yourself
and letting your efforts bless others carries the sweetest rewards of
all.
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