National Geographic has renewed natural history series A REAL BUG’S LIFE for a second season. Narrated by actress Awkwafina and produced by Plimsoll Productions, the series will take viewers on five new trips around the world to get up close and personal with insects and their moving stories. The new season will come to Disney+ this fall.
Inspired by the World of Disney and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, the new season will feature an all-new cast of insects including femme fatale firefly, bachelor luna moth, a real-life assassin bug, the botany bay weevil and other incredible tiny heroes living on our planet. The five-episode season of A REAL BUG’S LIFE will continue to tell the tales of love, perseverance and triumphs in their very own microworlds.
Using the latest camera technology, scientific revelation and an incredible score, audiences will crawl, fly and jump alongside bugs, experiencing new locations. With new microscopic terrains to explore, A REAL BUG’S LIFE will build off the first season, uncovering epic tales, mind-boggling facts and never-before-seen insect behavior.
This new season will include the episode THE MAKING OF… A FLY ON THE WALL, pulling back the curtain on the team of innovative scientists, filmmakers and bug experts as they share the process of bringing the tiniest creatures on earth to the big screen. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how the crew used cutting-edge technology and cameras to capture the bugs in their natural mini-habitats.
Step into the spellbinding world of bugs with the following episodes:
- LOVE IN THE FOREST (Smoky Mountains, Tennessee) – It’s the end of the longest day of summer. A young fawn frolics to exhaustion. While it falls asleep, the forest comes to life – and tonight, love is in the air. At the forest edge, a lonely female firefly is looking for a male, but the Big Dipper fireflies nearby are dancing to a different tune.
- LIFE’S A BEACH (Borneo, Malaysia) – The beach may look paradise to us … but it’s a brutal place for bugs to make a home. From the sand all the way out to the reef, the waves and the tides hammer their home 24/7. Time and tide wait for no bug.
- TINY HEROES DOWN UNDER (Australia) – Down Under – a land filled with familiar fluffy faces like kangaroos and koalas, but the bugs here are a lot of people’s worst nightmares. A eucalyptus forest in eastern Australia is full of ’em: funnel web fangs, ant stings … even exploding bombardier beetles! But there’s much more to Australian bugs than horror stories. Some are actually really cute as it goes.
- ONCE A POND A TIME (England) – Water is a cradle of life for all sorts of amazing tiny creatures, but when one is “bug-sized,” its strange shape-shifting properties can have huge consequences. Through the year, the pond undergoes a series of near-magical transformations from ice crystal to water vapor. The tiny creatures that make their home here have found amazing ways to cope with life in this turbulent world.
- THE MAKING OF … A FLY ON THE WALL – Surrounded by hordes of army ants, chasing the fastest-running insect on Earth, crawling through muddy mangroves … this was everyday life for the team of world-renowned scientists, experts and filmmakers who created A REAL BUG’S LIFE. Armed with innovative filming equipment, they stopped at nothing to reveal the untold stories of the planet’s most underappreciated animals – bugs!
A REAL BUG’S LIFE is produced by Plimsoll Productions for National Geographic. Martha Holmes, Grant Mansfield and Tom Hugh-Jones are executive producers for Plimsoll. For National Geographic, Justine Schmidt and Pamela Caragol serve as executive producers.