Summaries

Synopsis

In a deserted spot at the heart of a natural valley, a couple of young lovers has just finished a picnic lunch. The young man is taking a nap under the pine trees, while his girlfriend, who is pregnant, is reading a book and munching on strawberries. Suddenly the young woman starts to have contractions. Her companion wakes in a state of panic and helps her up. The future parents rush off in their car, leaving the tablecloth with the remains of their picnic lunch behind them.

At the same time, not very far away, under some leaves at the edge of a clearing, a ladybug is giving birth to three baby bugs. The childish Toofette and a group of flies often bully Cox, who is one of the litter.After their first lesson in how to take off and fly, the little family starts to head home. Except that the littlest ladybug Cox is also the most intrepid one and prefers discovering the outside world to obeying his mother and takes off alone in the forest.

Very soon the brave little ladybug meets a gang of flies that taunt and chase him. The ladybug tries to escape, but due to his lack of experience he is soon overtaken by the gang, loses control and falls into a crevasse. Left for dead by the flies, the ladybug slowly comes to and realizes he has lost a wing in the accident. When night falls, he crawls out of the crevasse and calls out for his parents. As no one answers, the ladybug starts to wander in the forest in the pouring rain and finally finds refuge in a tin of sugar cubes abandoned by the young couple.

The next morning, Cox awakens as bugs have raided the picnic and carry away the spoils.A column of black ants, attracted by the scent of sugar, heads for the tin box. On orders from their leader, Mandible, the worker ants lift up the box and start to take it back to their ant hill. A little later, the ladybug, who had remained inside the box, saves the ants' lives by chasing away a lizard, thus earning his place among the ants. On their journey, Cox befriends Mandible, the leader of the black ants.

But it is just the beginning of a series of adventures those will lead the ladybug and the black ants to fight against the red ants, to keep their sugar box.As the worker ants and ladybug traverse through the forest to their nest, the group of red ants spot them. Their leader, the dictator Butor, tries to stop them to get their food. Mandible bribes them with a sugar cube and walks around them with the sugar tin. Red ants decide to attack.The black ants escape by riding the tin down an embankment and into a river, with the red ants pursuing them in a soda can. At the rapids, Cox falls overboard and the ants rescue him from a pike named Boboche. As they go over a waterfall and the tin washes ashore, the soda can and Boboche sink to the bottom of the river. While the red ants escape, Boboche gets stuck in the sand and suffocates to death.

Black ants hide the tin can by the side of the river as for the next phase, they can only carry a few cubes by hand. While traveling to the black ant's territory, Cox meets another family of ladybugs and tries to join them. He falls in love with one of the females, but since he cannot fly, he decides to stay with the ants as his new family.The red ants have got their scent and are in pursuit. The red ants almost catch up, but the black ants take advantage of traffic on a mountain road to evade the red ants and reach their colony with the few cubes of sugar. Butor's troops flee to avoid being hit by a car on the mountain road, leaving Butor to follow the black ants to their anthill. This way, the red ants also find the location of the black ant colony.

Eventually, the black ants and Cox arrive at the territory, where Mandible invites Cox to join the colony and they present the sugar cubes to their queen. At midnight, Cox dreams of flying with both families and his girlfriend, but despite regaining some of his strength, he is still unable to fly.

The red ant leader reports to his queen, who orders a full-scale attack on the black ant colony. The siege starts and red ants throw projectiles to damage the black ant colony. In response, the black ants bring out the firecrackers. But they run out of matchsticks. The ladybug remembers that there was a match box in the picnic pack that the young couple left behind. Its wing has also healed so it volunteers to escape the siege and get the matchbox back.

At the picnic area, Cox finds the matchbox, but before he can fly back with it, a black spider runs off with the matchbox to its dollhouse home. Cox follows him into the house, where a frog named Jean-Paul tries to eat them. The duo fights back and Jean-Paul is seemingly killed after the house topples onto him. After bonding with the spider, Cox persuades him to give him the matches and sets out with them back to the nest. Along the way, he saves his lover, who has reached independence and has left her family, from Toofette's gang, who are killed after a chase ends in them being hit by a car.

Cox returns to the besieged fortress, and with the matches, the black ants light up their arsenal of fireworks to fight back against the red ants. The explosions start a wildfire in the forest, which drives the red ant colony away, with Butor swearing revenge. A fire and rescue plane patrol arrives and extinguishes the wildfire, saving Cox and the black ant colony but flattening the nest in the process. In the aftermath, the colony begins rebuilding, while Cox returns to the meadow to raise his new family with his partner. A few years later, they return to the newly rebuilt ant nest and Cox and his old friend watch the sunset. In a mid-credits scene, the ant who was storing the objects used to defeat the red ants manages to complete a number sliding puzzle.