Hayden Panettiere Had A Role In One Of Pixar's Earliest Movies

Hayden Panettiere may be best known for her starring role in NBC's "Heroes" or her stellar performance in "Nashville" and "Scream 4," but the late actress also had a long history with voiceover work. With the tragic news of Panettiere's passing, it's a good time to reminisce and celebrate her long career on the screen both big and small. "Heroes" and "Scream" are already well-known and we've written about why you should watch them before, but Panettiere also had roles in movies you may have forgotten about.

Such is the case with one of the earliest movies Pixar ever made, one that kind of gets ignored or forgotten when talking about early Pixar films. That movie is "A Bug's Life," which was released between the first two "Toy Story" movies. It follows an ant who inadvertently recruits a troupe of circus bugs he mistakes for mighty warriors to help an ant colony get rid of a gang of grasshoppers. In the film, Panettiere plays Princess Dot, the younger sister of the heir to the ant colony's throne.

"A Bug's Life" may not be as monumental a film as "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," or "Monsters, Inc.", but it's still a fun film with an interesting visual aesthetic. It does feature one of the darkest villain deaths in a Disney/Pixar movie, and a nice music score by Randy Newman.

This was Panettiere's first voice role, but it wouldn't be her last, as she found success in the medium of animation throughout her career.

Since "A Bug's Life" is now a Disney movie following the company's acquisition of Pixar, that would technically make Hayden Panettiere a Disney princess for playing Dot. Is it too late to include a reference to Dot in that scene in "Ralph Breaks the Internet" where all the Disney princesses gather? Because having the human princesses together with a tiny little ant would be very funny.

After her role in that movie, Panettiere followed "A Bug's Life" with a Disney movie and a very different kind of creature. She voiced Suri the lemur in Disney's forgotten 2000 movie "Dinosaur," which follows a family of lemurs and the orphan Iguanodon they adopted as they navigate a post-meteorite world in search of a new home. It's a visually stunning movie with an incredible score and the greatest dinosaur villains since the raptors in the first "Jurassic Park."

Panettiere also had voice roles in "Diary of a New Girl," "Scooby-Doo! and the Goblin King," "Alpha and Omega," and "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil." On TV, she played roles in animated shows like "Fillmore!", "Robot Chicken," and "American Dad!", while also playing parts in beloved video games like "Until Dawn" (where she did both voice acting and motion capture performance) and the "Kingdom Hearts" franchise. It's a shame Panettiere didn't get more opportunities to voice animated characters late in her career, because she was a very good voice actor. Celebrity stunt casting is a real problem in animated movies, and most of the time it's painfully obvious when the actor is actively trying to make it clear they are the person behind the voice. Panettiere was able to truly portray different characters and make them feel unique, even when the roles weren't that big.