10 Heart-Breaking Pixar Backstories You Probably Missed

8. Thumper - A Bug's Life

What the hell happened to Thumper? Is he supposed to be some sort of deranged variant of Hopper and his "normal" army of grasshoppers? If that's the case, why is he basically treated like a dog? His feral nature suggests something about his treatment: he's basically Danny The Dog.

Clearly Thumper has been some seriously dark stuff: if he's genuinely just handicapped, then putting him on a leash and using him for your own malevolent ends is a pretty unforgivable crime, and while everyone's distracted by Hopper's grand evil scheme to steal all of the ants' food (which is just natural selection in process), they ignore the fact that he's made a pet out of poor Thumper.

So next time you grimace at how harsh Hopper's death is, remember that his evil was enough to make you genuinely cheer Thumper - an innocent creature put through some perverse, unnamed torture - getting beaten up when he genuinely doesn't know any better.