Bee Movie – Review

Reviews


Image courtesy of impawards.com

Director:

Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith

Cast:

Jerry Seinfeld……….Barry B. Benson (voice)
Renée Zellweger……….Vanessa Bloome (voice)
Matthew Broderick……….Adam Flayman (voice)
Patrick Warburton……….Ken (voice)
John Goodman……….Layton T. Montgomery (voice)
Chris Rock……….Mooseblood (voice)
Kathy Bates……….Janet Benson (voice)
Barry Levinson……….Martin Benson (voice)
Larry King……….Bee Larry King (voice)
Ray Liotta……….Ray Liotta (voice)
Sting……….Sting (voice)
Oprah Winfrey……….Judge Bumbleton (voice)
Larry Miller……….Buzzwell (voice)
Megan Mullally……….Trudy (voice)
Rip Torn……….Lou Lo Duca (voice)
Michael Richards……….Bud Ditchwater (voice)

To call Bee Movie bizarre is a good place to start, but that assessment is probably too simplistic. Better put: Bee Movie is the strangest animated movie to be done in such a straight-laced manner. The film handles its surprisingly outlandish premise with a matter-of-fact attitude that implies the filmmakers’ belief that nothing should be so plainly obvious as bee and humans living together as equals in perfect racial harmony.

The concept is not inherently weird as many movies have stressed the equal standing of animals and humans. Nor is Bee Movie unique in its frequent alternating between the bees’ bee and human characteristics depending on which better serves the story at that juncture. What is jarring is the more than subtle love story between bee, Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld), and human, Vanessa Bloome (Renee Zellweger). The film’s treatment of this story arc as the most natural and apparent path for the plot to follow is equally distracting and hilarious. The result is a kids’ movie that is unabashedly for adults.

Credit Seinfeld for masking his renewed desire to entertain a more mature audience by pretending to do a movie for children. Animated movies have been heading in a more adult direction for years, and Bee Movie is not without its children’s humor, but Seinfeld and his collaborators seem bent on perhaps enabling the genre to one day make a movie specifically for adults. If that is not the case then Bee Movie is either giving its young audience too much credit, or I am too old to recognize the comedy that is meant explicitly for youngsters.

The former may be true, but I doubt that the latter is. Observe one of the film’s more pervasive jokes: Ray Liotta playing himself as a honey salesman. The film derives much humor not only from the fact that Liotta usually plays eccentric characters with a hint of malice, but also the idea that kids would have no idea who Ray Liotta is. In another particularly Seinfeldian bit, Barry B. Benson lampoons Bee Larry King with a very tongue-in-cheek dressing down of human Larry King’s actual show. None of this is any more unusual than say a “Cops” spoof in Shrek 2, but Bee Movie builds much of its persona from mocking its young (and presumably ignorant) audience.

Bee Movie‘s slight disdain of its audience is all the more glaring when its somewhat environmentally aware plot really gets going. Aside from the bestial love story, Bee Movie also takes interest in the symbiotic relationship between bees and humans or, more specifically, mankind’s exploitative approach to the natural world. When Barry discovers that humans are profiting by selling the bees’ honey (with Ray Liotta as a salesman, no less!) he sues the entire human race for reparations. When the bees win the case, all the honey is returned, and they never have to work another day of their lives. But the world’s plant population needs bees in order to survive, and it turns out bees truly like to work because that has what they have been doing for millions of years.

Try as it might Bee Movie cannot escape from offering the preachy “everybody has a role” message so prevalent in all kids’ movies. Like its protagonist, Bee Movie is able to venture away from the hive mindset for a while, but in the end it is reigned in by its own primal instinct. Bee Movie tries to be something other than a kids’ movie, but the world needs it to be because that is what kids’ movies have been doing for millions of years. And much like Barry learns that he does not mind being a bee so much, Bee Movie comes to realize that it is more or less content with being a kids’ movie.

FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):