Bee Movie (2007)

Seinfeld’s Bee

Bee Movie is the film Jerry Seinfeld made after Seinfeld, and it’s one of the strangest mainstream animated films of its decade. He co-wrote it, produced it and voiced the lead, and he spent years on it, reportedly treating it as seriously as anything he’d ever done. The result is a film full of very funny observational jokes, handsome animation and a story that makes less sense the more you think about it.

Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner directed it for DreamWorks, and it came out in November 2007. It made a lot of money and got mixed reviews, and years later it became an internet joke, thanks to its opening narration and its odd romance. I give it a 6. It’s funnier than its reputation and much weirder than it needed to be.

It’s also a revealing film. It shows what happens when a great stand-up comedian, used to building a routine joke by joke, tries to build a feature-length story, and discovers that a string of good observations doesn’t add up to a plot. The jokes are his. The structure never is.

A Career for Life

Barry B. Benson has just graduated from bee school and is about to start his lifelong career at Honex, the hive’s honey factory. On his first day, he learns that whatever job he chooses, he’ll do it every day for the rest of his life, and he panics. He doesn’t want to spend his whole life stirring honey.

It’s a classic Seinfeld premise: a man faced with the absurd routines of ordinary life, complaining about them. The early scenes in the hive, with its factory, its traffic, its graduation ceremony and its tiny bee commuters, are the best in the film. They’re full of the jokes Seinfeld is famous for, observations about work, family and choice, filtered through the world of bees.

Barry joins the Pollen Jocks, the elite bees who fly outside the hive to collect nectar, for a single trip, and he goes out into New York City. It’s the first time he’s ever seen the human world, and he loves it: the colors, the noise, the parks and the endless variety of flowers. It’s also terrifying, because humans swat bees, and the film captures both feelings in one exhilarating flight.

The Opening Narration

The film opens with a narrator explaining that according to all known laws of aviation, a bee shouldn’t be able to fly, because its wings are too small to lift its fat little body. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible. It’s meant as a small statement of the film’s theme, about ignoring the limits other people set for you, and it sets a playful tone for what follows.

The opening is mildly charming, and for years it was just that. Then, around 2016, the internet discovered it, and the entire script of Bee Movie became one of the most shared jokes online, pasted into comment sections and remixed into videos that speed the film up every time a character says the word bee. Many people now know the opening lines without ever having seen the film.

That’s a strange afterlife for a film Seinfeld worked on so carefully. The joke isn’t really on the film. It’s on the gap between how seriously it takes itself and how odd it is. Seinfeld has taken it in good humour, and the meme has probably introduced the film to more viewers than its original release ever did.

Vanessa

In the city, Barry is caught in a rainstorm and ends up in the apartment of Vanessa Bloome, a florist, voiced by Renée Zellweger. When her boyfriend tries to squash him, she saves Barry’s life, and Barry, breaking the most important rule of the hive, speaks to her to thank her.

They become friends, and then something more, and this is where the film gets strange. Barry and Vanessa have long, tender conversations, go for coffee and flirt, and her boyfriend, voiced by Patrick Warburton, becomes increasingly furious that his girlfriend is falling for a bee. The film treats it as a gentle romance, and most audiences find it baffling.

Zellweger is warm and likeable, and Seinfeld’s timing is good, and none of it quite explains why a florist would fall for an insect the size of her thumb. The film seems to know it’s odd, and it keeps the romance vague and chaste. That only makes it odder. It’s the single element people most often mention when they talk about the film, and rarely with affection.

The Lawsuit

On a trip to the supermarket, Barry discovers that humans have been taking honey from bees and selling it, and he’s appalled. He decides to sue the entire human race for stealing honey, and the film turns into a courtroom comedy, with Barry arguing his own case against a grandstanding Southern lawyer, voiced by John Goodman.

The trial scenes have some of the film’s best jokes. There are cameos from Ray Liotta, whose brand of honey is on trial, and Sting, who is accused of exploiting bees with his name, and Oprah Winfrey voices the judge. Goodman is terrific as the lawyer, all bluster and folksy menace, and Barry’s cross-examinations are pure Seinfeld.

Barry wins. All the honey in the world is returned to the bees, the courtroom erupts, and Barry becomes a hero to every hive on Earth. It’s the high point of the film, the moment its comic premise pays off completely. That’s exactly when its logic starts to fall apart.

The Logic Problem

With all the honey they could ever need, the bees stop working. The Pollen Jocks stop flying, the flowers stop being pollinated, and plants all over the world start to die. The film suddenly becomes a story about environmental catastrophe, and it’s the bees’ fault, because Barry won his case. The film turns its hero’s triumph into a disaster almost overnight, and asks the audience to feel that he was wrong to fight.

The problem is that none of this makes sense, even by the film’s own rules. Bees don’t make honey because humans take it. Pollination doesn’t depend on honey production. And the film’s message, that the bees should go back to work so humans can keep taking their honey, is the opposite of everything the first two acts argued.

That’s a strange, muddled turn, and it leaves the audience unsure what the film is trying to say. The courtroom story was about justice for bees. The ending is about bees knowing their place. Bee Movie never notices the contradiction, and the final scenes, with everyone happily back at work, play as if the lawsuit had been a mistake all along.

The Rose Parade

The climax takes place at the Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena, where the last healthy flowers in the world are on display. Barry and Vanessa steal the flowers to restart pollination, and Barry ends up having to land a passenger jet, with Vanessa’s help, when the pilots are knocked out.

This is a big, busy, loud set piece that feels like it belongs to a different film. The bees fly in formation to guide the plane, the flowers are saved, and the natural order is restored. It’s well animated and has a few good jokes, and by this point the story has lost any sense of what it’s about.

There’s a certain charm in its sheer excess, with a bee piloting a passenger jet to save the world’s last roses, and children usually love it. Adults tend to spend it wondering how a film about a honey lawsuit ended up here. It’s the clearest example of the film choosing spectacle over the story it set out to tell.

The Animation and Cast

The animation is handsome. The hive is designed with real wit, a tiny industrial city in yellow and gold, and New York seen from a bee’s height is often beautiful: enormous flowers, towering buildings and rain falling like bombs. The flying sequences, with Barry darting through traffic and parks, are exciting.

The voice cast is strong. Matthew Broderick voices Barry’s friend Adam, Chris Rock has a small, very funny part as a mosquito, and Larry King appears as a bee version of himself. Seinfeld himself is good as Barry, dry and neurotic, and his performance holds the film together even when the story doesn’t.

The film’s best moments are the small ones: Barry and Adam chatting as they fly to work, grumbling about their parents and their futures, a bee pilot panicking about a windshield, a mosquito complaining about how nobody respects bloodsuckers. That’s where Seinfeld’s gift for everyday absurdity shines, and it’s why the film is worth watching despite its problems.

The TV Junk Campaign

Seinfeld promoted the film with a series of live-action short trailers called TV Junk. That showed him in a bee costume trying to make the film, being hoisted around on wires and arguing with Steven Spielberg and other producers. They’re funnier than much of the film itself, and they showed exactly the kind of wry, self-mocking humour the film needed more of.

He also appeared at the Cannes Film Festival dressed as a bee, sliding down a wire from the top of a hotel. It was a very Seinfeld piece of promotion, a comedian at the height of his fame gleefully making a fool of himself in public, and it helped make the film a hit. Plenty of people went to see Bee Movie because they’d enjoyed the stunts around it.

The campaign also hinted at something the film itself rarely admits: that the whole project was a slightly absurd idea and Seinfeld knew it. The trailers are knowing and self-aware in a way the finished film, earnest about its bees and its romance, almost never is. A little more of that spirit would have made it a much better film.

Where Bee Movie Falls Short

The logic, and the romance. Bee Movie sets up a world with clear rules and then breaks them whenever the plot needs it, and its final message contradicts its first two acts. The bee and florist romance is never explained or justified, and it becomes the film’s defining oddity, the thing that overshadows everything good the film does.

On the other side: the hive scenes, the courtroom scenes, John Goodman, Chris Rock and plenty of funny Seinfeld observations. It earns a 6. That’s a strange, uneven, sometimes delightful film. It’s worth one viewing to see what happens when one of the great comedians of his generation tries to make an animated film entirely on his own terms.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Bee Movie

Once, yes. It’s a 6. The hive and courtroom scenes are funny, the animation is handsome and Seinfeld’s voice is a pleasure. The romance and the ending make no sense, and knowing that going in makes it much more enjoyable.

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