As the long-awaited follow-up to Toy Story, A Bug's Life will inevitably disappoint. Adults at least. Because, make no bones about it, adults as much as children took that witty, delightful animation to their hearts, and the studio charged with its making, Pixar, packed the piece with as many chunky gags for grown-ups as for their target audience. Something for everyone.

A Bug's Life still has something for everyone, but one wonders if the Disney parent hasn't asked for something altogether sweeter. This story of an ant colony hiring outsiders to help protect itself against marauding grasshoppers (shades of The Seven Samurai), looks fantastic but, nods to Kurasowa and Poltergeist aside, lacks its predecessor’s bite. The computer animation may have come on leaps and bounds -- this looks so much better than the already remarkable Toy Story -- but the ends to which it is put have gotten a little soggy along the way.

Midsummer. The ants gather their yearly offering to a badass grasshopper gang lead by the vicious Hopper (voiced with relish by Kevin Spacey). Only this year one of the workers, Flik (Dave Foley), accidentally sabotages the sacrifice and Hopper demands reparations: double by the end of the summer or else. Mortified, Flik sets out for the city to find warrior insects to help the colony defend itself, only to mistakenly return with a hapless, out-of-work circus troupe.

All of which is glorious to look at. The animation is sharp and characterful, far more so than traditional flat, amateurish Disney techniques. If nothing else it's a pleasure to simply admire the detail, the lighting and the exquisite use of focus Lasseter's team achieve.

And yet, good as the anthropomorphizing is, our heroes in general, and the circus outcasts in particular (who bare comparison to the stop-motion insects in Henry Selick's James & The Giant Peach), are irksome. They are as soft and rounded in character as their big-eyed, pastel hues are to look at. Meaning, inevitably, that it’s the villainous Hopper and his crew who enliven the screen every time they appear. Hard, dark and angular, they are nothing more or less than an insectoid Corman biker gang, descending upon an innocent town intent on mayhem. If Flik and his pals are trad Disney, Hopper's mob buzzing out of a reddened sky are nothing less than a microcosmic Apocalypse Now.

Saddled with a grisly score by Randy Newman (but fortunately only one song), A Bug's Life is sadly never more than the sum of some very considerable parts. And what does it tell you that the real highlights are the credits, with 'outtakes' of the insect performers prat-falling and fluffing lines? Adults will love it, but the five and six year-olds with them will be mystified. Dreamworks' own recent computer animated ant flick, Antz, might look only half as good but Woody Allen and a much better script overcome cute most any ways you cut it.