In the hit animated feature film A Bug's Life, West Marin School sixth-grader Brenden Hickey makes his debut as an ant only his mother would recognize.

"He's the taller, skinnier ant who torments Dot," said his mother, Karen Kiser, a Pixar Studios computer animator who landed her son the bit role of a bug that likes to tease a young princess ant.

"He doesn't exactly torment her," she explained. "He's just not nice."

Because filmmaking keeps her away from her Inverness home for long hours, Kiser said that when production began on A Bug's Life , she took her twin sons into work with her to record some "scratch dialogue" - that is, a reading of the script merely meant for the animators to work around.

During a stretch of seven months, working nearly 60 hours a week at Pixar's Point Richmond studios, Kiser volunteered to animate sequences that included her children's voices, she said.

One sequence, where the young ants follow the main character Flik to the edge of an island, took Kiser two weeks to create, she said. It involves three characters walking together for about 600 frames, and it lasts only 11 seconds in the movie.

"I don't see my son as much as I like, and here I am working with his voice," she recalled. "It was really surreal at times."

Ultimately, son Brenden's voice turned out to be as expressive as any professional actor's. Director John Lasseter finally invited the 11-year-old to audition for the part at Studio One in San Francisco - and Hickey landed the part.

"I wasn't really trying," Hickey told The Light. "It was just my voice he liked."

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