Bee Movie (2007)

Rating:
Director: Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith
Starring: Jerry Seinfeld, Matthew Broderick, Renée Zellweger , John Goodman

Jerry Seinfeld spent the nineties producing the most original and entertaining sitcom of a generation—but what has he done for us lately? The release of Bee Movie demonstrates that Seinfeld has not lost his ability to lampoon the mundane details of daily life and relationships, and, untethered from even the tenuous grip on reality his NBC sitcom maintained, can deliver a fanciful story with the same kinds of wild sways of story logic, but on a grander scale.

I’m saying, Bee Movie is pretty damned good.

Caveat: Despite the kid-friendly designs and the merchandising, this isn’t particularly a story for little kids. It’s not too adult in the “nightmares for a week” or “Mommy, what does ‘blowjob’ mean?” sense—it’s just largely concerned with lampooning the grownup world. While it held the attention of the all the under-seven children littering my screening, it didn’t have them howling with laughter. In what has to be a first for animation released in the last 20 years, there is not a single fart joke. There is also not a single juvenile character.

But hey, the thing is rated PG, and that’s just what it is—not unsuitable for smaller children, but definitely not playing to them, either. It’s playing to the rest of us. Put it between the closer-to-kid-friendly Simpsons and the not-so-friendly-to-anyone Family Guy.

Seinfeld’s character, Barry, has just graduated college (at the age of nine days) and has to choose the job he’ll have within the hive for the rest of his life. His anxiety about this is soon overtaken by the crush he develops on a human woman, and we get really smartly written scenes in which they talk like any couple on a first date, the deliberately clichéd or vapid dialogue rendered funnier because, you know, one of them is a freakin’ bee. Barry ends up on a mad crusade through the legal system when he discovers that humans are exploiting bees, selling stolen honey by the truckload. So, there are your themes: Career anxiety, the absurdity of modern dating, and a parody of the courtroom pursuit of social justice. Have fun, kiddies.

Undeniably, the whole thing works. You know how sometimes on Seinfeld, Jerry would go off on a comic tangent for maybe two minutes, something about old Superman comics or something? This movie feels, delightfully, like one of those riffs spun off into a full story. Taking notes during the screening, I found myself trying to transcribe the entire script, as one quick joke after another rolled by.

Writing aside, the animation is excellent. At first it seems a bit too clean, too polished, but very quickly we’re lost in the animators’ vision of an anthropomorphic bee hive—a combination of fifties suburbia and a Dr. Seuss factory. Directors Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith keeps the story, um, buzzing along, and Seinfeld’s pull seems to have delivered an amazing voice cast. Renée Zellweger turns out to be much more enjoyable when you don’t have to actually look at her. John Goodman is, as always, hilariously larger than life. Broderick is perfect as Seinfeld’s best friend, and Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey, Ray Liotta and others make memorable cameos. One Seinfeld sidekick pops up: Patrick Warburton, who was Elaine’s occasional boyfriend Puddy, takes that character a few notches crazier as the jealous beau of Zellweger’s Vanessa.

The film is delightful to watch, with a lot of action and visual interest—that’s probably what kept the kids from rebelling—and little sight gags tucked in all over the place. A bee-world newspaper headline screams, “Frisbee hits hive!” and the factory is full of honey-derived corporate logos. The clever transposition of human concerns to bee culture results in a brisk flow of quick jokes, and the overall storyline, like many a great Seinfeld episode, holds together fine if you don’t think too long and just go along with it.