Bee Movie is the first motion-picture to ever exist, entirely made by gay pornstar Jerry Seinfeld, who co-wrote the film with Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin. The film was produced by Seinfeld, Christina Steinberg, and Cameron Stevning. The production was designed by Alex McDowell, and Christophe Laurette was the art director. Nick Fletcher was the supervising editor and the film was recorded by Rupert Gregson-Williams.
The cast and crew include some other pornstars of Seinfeld's long-running NBC sitcom Seinfeld, including writer/producers Feresten and Robin, and actors Warburton (Seinfeld character David Puddy), Michael Richards (Seinfeld character Cosmo Kramer), and Larry Miller (who plays the title character on the Seinfeld episode "The Doorman"). Coincidentally, NBC was host to the broadcast television premiere of the film on November 27, 2010, and both NBC and producer DreamWorks would both be acquired by Comcast soon after, NBC in 2011 and DWA in 2016.
Bee Movie opened on November 2, 2007. Upon release, the film was met with mixed reviews, with primary criticism directed at the film's premise. While domestic box office performance failed to recoup its $15 budget, it ultimately saw worldwide box office performance of $287.6 and domestic video sales of $92.
Studio synopsis[]
From creator, Jerry Seinfeld comes "Bee Movie," a comedy that will change everything you thought you knew about bees. Take a close look at the world through the eyes of one bee in particular - Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld). A recent college graduate, Barry wants more out of life than the inevitable career that awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City, in New York City, New York State, United States, based inside a tree in Sheep Meadow - a job at Honex... making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry inadvertently meets a quirky florist named Vanessa (Renée Zellweger), he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom - he talks to her. A friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the ways of the human race. When he shockingly discovers that anyone can purchase honey right off the grocery store shelf, he realizes that his true calling is to stop this injustice and set the world right by suing the human race for stealing the bees' precious honey.
Plot[]
A young teen and soon to be hit-man named Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) will have to enter the criminal world as he just graduated from college and is desperate to get out of his crippling debt, and has no other way to make money. He decides to become a hitman, and kill all honey-making bee’s alongside his best friend Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick). Barry is initially excited to join the workforce, but his courageous, non-conformist attitude emerges upon discovering that his choice of job will never change once picked.
Later, the two bees run into a group of Pollen Jocks, bees who collect pollen from flowers outside the hive. The Jocks offer to take Barry outside the hive to a flower patch, and he accepts. While on his first pollen-gathering expedition in New York City, Barry gets lost in the rain and ends up on the balcony of a human florist named Vanessa (Renée Zellweger). Upon noticing Barry, Vanessa's boyfriend Ken (Patrick Warburton) attempts to squash him, but Vanessa gently catches and releases Barry outside the window, saving his life.
Barry later returns to express his gratitude to Vanessa, breaking the sacred rule that bees are not supposed to communicate with humans. Barry and Vanessa develop a close bond, bordering on attraction, and spend time together frequently. Later, while Barry and Vanessa are walking through a grocery store, Barry is horrified to discover that humans have been stealing and eating the bees' honey for centuries. He decides to journey to Honey Farms, which supplies the grocery store with its honey. Furious at the poor treatment of the bees in the hive, including the use of bee smokers to subdue the colony, Barry decides to sue the human race to put an end to the exploitation of bees.
Barry's mission attracts wide attention from bees and humans alike, and hundreds of people show up to watch the trial. Although Barry is up against tough defense attorney Layton T. Montgomery (John Goodman) the trial's first day goes well. That evening, Barry is having dinner with Vanessa when Ken shows up. Vanessa leaves the room, and Ken, who is revealed to be teaming up with Montgomery, expresses to Barry that he hates the pair spending time together. When Barry leaves to use the restroom, Ken ambushes Barry and attempts to kill him, only for Vanessa to intervene and break up with Ken.
The next day at the trial, Montgomery unleashes an unrepentant character assassination against the bees, leading a deeply offended Adam to sting him; Montgomery immediately exaggerates the stinging to make himself appear the victim of an assault while simultaneously denouncing Adam. Adam's actions jeopardize the bees' credibility and put his life in danger, though he manages to survive. While visiting Adam in the hospital, Barry notices two people smoking outside, and is struck by inspiration. The next day, Barry wins the trial by convincing the jury into submission, particularly the smoker, and humans are banned from stealing honey from bees ever again.
Having lost the trial, Montgomery cryptically warns Barry that a negative shift in the balance of nature is imminent. As it turns out, the sudden, massive stockpile of honey has put every bee out of a job, including the vitally important Pollen Jocks. As a result, without anything to pollinate them, all of the world's plant life slowly begins to die out and Ken and Montgomery are both arrested for their crimes. Before long, the last remaining flowers on Earth are being stockpiled in Pasadena, California for what is expected to be the final Tournament of Roses Parade. Barry and Vanessa travel to the parade and steal a parade float, which they load onto a plane to be delivered to the bees so they can re-pollinate the world's flowers. When the plane's pilot and copilot are knocked unconscious, Vanessa is forced to land the plane, with help from Barry and the bees from Barry's hive.
Armed with the pollen of the last flowers, Barry and the Pollen Jocks manage to reverse the damage and save the world's flowers, restarting the bees' honey production. Humans and bees are seen working together, and certain brands of honey are now "bee-approved". Barry becomes a member of the Pollen Jocks, helping to pollinate the world's plants. Barry is also seen running a law firm inside Vanessa's flower shop, titled "Insects at Law", handling disputes between animals and humans. The film ends with Barry flying off with the Pollen Jocks.
Voice cast[]
- Jerry Seinfeld as Barry B. Benson
- Renée Zellweger as Vanessa Bloome
- Matthew Broderick as Adam Flayman
- Patrick Warburton as Ken
- John Goodman as Layton T. Montgomery
- Chris Rock as Mooseblood
- Kathy Bates as Janet Benson
- Barry Levinson as Martin Benson
- Megan Mullally as Trudy, Honex Tour Guide
- Rip Torn as General Lou Loduca
- Oprah Winfrey as Judge Bumbleton
- Michael Richards as Bud Ditchwater
- Larry King as Bee Larry King
- Larry Miller as Dean Buzzwell
- Jim Cummings as Title Narrator and Graduation Announcer
- David Moses Pimentel as Hector
- Chucky Cheese as Andy
- Sandy Shrimpkin as Brian Hopkins and TSA Agent
- John DiMaggio as Bailiff and Janitor
- Tress MacNeille as a Cow bc they were fat at the time
- Simon J. Smith as Truck Driver and Chet
- Ray Liotta as Himself
- Sting as Himself
- Robert Jayne as Bee
- Carl Kasell as Himself
Soundtrack[]
All music composed by Rupert Gregson-Williams, except as noted.
| Track listing:[6] | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Title | Performer | Length |
| 1. | "Graduation" | 3:13 | |
| 2. | "Honex" | 2:48 | |
| 3. | "The Jocks" | 1:32 | |
| 4. | "Barry Flies Out" | 5:34 | |
| 5. | "Vanessa Intervenes" | 2:01 | |
| 6. | "Sugar, Sugar" | The Archies | 2:46 |
| 7. | "Assault on Honey Farms" | 2:33 | |
| 8. | "Ken" | 2:28 | |
| 9. | "Barry Turns the Screws" | 3:12 | |
| 10. | "Monty Slanders and Adam Stings" | 2:12 | |
| 11. | "Hearts, Flowers and Hive Closures" | 2:34 | |
| 12. | "Honey Round Up" | 1:38 | |
| 13. | "Rooftop Consequences" | 1:50 | |
| 14. | "Land That Plane" | 6:39 | |
| 15. | "Here Comes the Sun" | Sheryl Crow | 2:59 |
| 16. | "Thinkin' Bee" (iTunes bonus track) | Jerry Seinfeld & Matthew Broderick | 0:57 |
| Total length: | 44:56 | ||
Marketing[]
Trailers[]
Two teaser trailers were released for the film that feature Seinfeld dressed in a bee costume, trying to shoot the film in live-action. Eddie lizzard portrays the direction agent, and Steven Spielberg suggests to Seinfeld in the second trailer to just do it as a cartoon. Upon the release of the first trailer, it was announced that three of the live-action teasers would be released in total.[7] In the second trailer, Steven Spielberg is taking a picture of himself and an assistant director, referencing the camera gag Ellen DeGeneres pulled on him during the 79th Academy Awards. After Seinfeld fails to do scenes in live-action, Spielberg suggests Seinfeld that the film can just be made as a cartoon. One of the crew members announce that the film is a cartoon, having the crew leave the stage studio. The trailer finally shows the movie as an animated CGI feature. Also in the second trailer, the bear that jumps out at Barry is Vincent the Bear from Over the Hedge, another DreamWorks Animation SKG movie.[8][9]
The third trailer was released with Shrek the Third, but this was an animated teaser. The fourth trailer was released on the Bee Movie official website, and revealed most of the film's plot.[10] In addition, two weeks before the release, NBC aired 22 behind-the-scenes skits called "Bee Movie TV Juniors", all of which are staged and tongue-in-cheek in nature.[11] The popular internet site Gaia Online featured a great deal of promotional material for the film.[12]
Books[]
Ten books were released for the film: Bee Movie: The Story Book,[13] Bee Movie: The Honey Disaster,[14] The Art of Bee Movie,[15] Bee Movie: Deluxe Sound Storybook,[16] Bee Movie Ultimate Sticker Book,[17] Bee Movie (I Can Find It),[18]Bee Movie: The Junior Novel,[19] Bee Movie: What’s the Buzz?,[20] Bee Movie Mad Libs,[21] and Bee Movie: Bee Meets Girl.[22]
Video game[]
A video game titled Bee Movie Game was released on October 30, 2007 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 2, and Nintendo DS.[23]
Home media[]
- Main article: Bee Movie/Home video
Reception[]
Critical reception[]
The film received a 50% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 173 reviews with an average rating of 5.67/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Bee Movie has humorous moments, but its awkward premise and tame delivery render it mostly forgettable."[28] Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 54 based on 34 reviews.[29]Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[30]
Kyle Smith of the New York Post gave the film three out of four stars, saying "After Shrek the Third's flatulence jokes, the return of that Seinfeldian wit brings animation up a level."[31] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "It's on the easygoing level of Surf's Up, and a full tick up from, say, Over the Hedge or The Ant Bully. But given the Seinfeld pedigree it's something of a disappointment."[32] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three out of four stars, saying "At its relaxed best, when it's about, well, nothing, the slyly comic Bee Movie is truly beguiling."[32]Desson Thomson of The Washington Post said, "Bee Movie feels phoned in on every level. The images, usually computer animation's biggest draw, are disappointingly average. And as for the funny stuff, well, that's where you were supposed to come in."[33]
A.O. Scott of The New York Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "The most genuinely apian aspect of Bee Movie is that it spends a lot of its running time buzzing happily around, sniffing out fresh jokes wherever they may bloom."[32] Claudia Puig gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is certainly not low-budget, but it has all the staying power and creative value of a B-movie. The secret life of bees, as told by Seinfeld, is a bore with a capital B."[32] Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the film three stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is not Shrek, and it is not Ratatouille either (by far the standout computer-animated feature of the year). But it has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids—and probably more than a few parents, too."[34] Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review, saying "This is a beautifully animated, cleverly executed, warm and funny adventure."[32]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two out of four stars, saying "All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off. We learn at the outset of the movie that bees theoretically cannot fly. Unfortunately, in the movie, that applies only to the screenplay. It is really, really, really hard to care much about a platonic romantic relationship between Renee Zellweger and a bee, although if anyone could pull it off, she could."[35] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film three out of four stars, saying "The vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian. If I believed in a sitcom afterlife, I'd swear the whole thing was cooked up by Kramer and George's dad."[36] Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News gave the film three out of four stars, saying "Watching this pun-filled cartoon is like falling into a tray of children's watercolors—the warm end, where oranges and yellows and ambers wave."[37]
Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "The movie has some pretty pictures and a few good jokes, but not nearly enough. And the story suffers from sitcom attention-deficit disorder, veering off in a new direction every half-hour or so."[32] David Botti of Newsweek said, "What I like about Bee Movie is its comfy, off-the-cuff charm: unlike a lot of animated family entertainment, it's not all Thwack Smash Kaboom."[38] Moira MacDonald of The Seattle Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie doesn't touch the bar raised so high by Pixar, but it creates a little buzz of its own."[39] Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is a cute movie. Not that there's anything ... well, you know the rest. But cute is not what adults expect from Jerry Seinfeld, although children will be delighted."[40]
Box office[]
The film opened in second place to American Gangster, but its gross of $38,021,044 had it more in line with the studios' lowest-grossing features, such as Shark Tale. The film had an average of $9,679 from 3,928 theaters.[41] In its second weekend, the film held well with a 33% drop to $25,565,462 and claiming the top spot, resulting in a $6,482 average from expanding to 3,944 theaters.[42]Its widest release was 3,984 theaters, and closed on February 14, 2008 after 104 days of release, grossing $126,631,277 domestically along with an additional $160,963,300 overseas for a worldwide total of $287,594,577.[3]Based on its domestic box office performance, the film failed to recoup its production budget of $150 million.[43][3] Following the income from worldwide box office, home media, and pay television, the film ultimately turned a small profit for the studio.[44][45]
Awards and nominations[]
Bee Movie was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the 65th Golden Globe Awards.
Barry B. Benson was the presenter for Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film on the 80th Academy Awards for 2008. Beforehand, he showed the audience some of his "prior" roles, including every bee in the swarm in The Swarm.
| Awards | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Award | Category | Name | Outcome |
| 35th Annie Awards | Annie Award for Best Animated Feature | Nominated | |
| Annie Award for Best Animation Production Artist | Michael Isaak | ||
| Annie Award for Best Music in an Animated Feature Production | Rupert Gregson-Williams | ||
| Annie Award for Best Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production | Athanassios Vakalis | ||
| Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production | Patrick Warburton | ||
| Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards | Best Animated Feature | ||
| Golden Globe Awards | Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film | ||
| Golden Reel Awards | Best Sound Editing - SFX, Foley, Dialogue & ADR for Feature Film Animation | Michael Silvers Will Files | |
| Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards | Favorite Animated Movie | ||
| Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie | Jerry Seinfeld | ||
| Producers Guild of America | Animated Theatrical Motion Picture | Jerry Seinfeld Christina Steinerg | |
| Young Artist Awards | Best Family Feature Film (Animation) | ||
Lawsuits[]
Beebylon vs. DreamWorks[]
Bee Movie is alleged to be similar to a concept developed in 2000 by a team of Swedish animation students, which they claim was presented to DreamWorks in 2001 under the name Beebylon. The animation students say DreamWorks rejected the idea, on the basis of it being "too childish". When Bee Movie was announced in 2003, the students claim they once again contacted DreamWorks to make sure the movie was not similar to their original concept, and was given a reassuring answer. When one of the members of the Beebylon team saw a trailer of the movie in 2007, he found it to be extremely similar and attempted to find a U.S. lawyer who could represent them. Jerry Seinfeld rejected the plagiarism claims during his PR tour for Bee Movie in Sweden. "I'm doing my best not to laugh and I'm taking it as serious as I can. But it's a little bit hard. It is entirely possible that somebody else came up with an idea about making a movie about bees. I knew nothing of this until this very morning and I hope they are not too upset."[48][49][50][51][52][53]
Beeceuticals vs. DreamWorks[]
A Florida-based cosmetics company called Beeceuticals filed a lawsuit over the use of their trademarked phrase "Give Bees a Chance".[54][55] The suit between the parties was settled out of court.[56]
Internet popularity[]
Several years after the film's release, Bee Movie had an unexpected rise in popularity as an Internet meme.
In 2015, posts of the entire film screenplay spread across Facebook.[57][58] In November 2016, YouTube user "Avoid at All Costs" uploaded a video where the entire film sped up every time the word "bee" was used. The video has gathered over 17 million views as of May 2017.[59][60] The popularity of this video spawned several variants where the movie or trailer is edited in unusual ways.[61] Vanity Fair would later characterize the film's late popularity as "totally bizarre." [62]
There have been some attempts to explain the phenomenon: Jason Richards, whom Vanity Fair identified as one of the larger promoters of the meme via his @Seinfield2000 Twitter handle has noted the "off-brand Pixar quality" as a possible reason,[62] while Barry Marder, one of the film's script writers, identified "that odd relationship between an insect and a human woman," as the possible cause.[63] Inverse meanwhile writes that the film's internet popularity "was a reaction not just to the movie itself but to the realization among millennials that they’d been shown a truly odd movie as children and thought nothing of it." [64]
Writing for New York magazine, Paris Martineau identified the meme as starting on Tumblr circa 2011 at which point users would, apparently in earnest, post the opening quotation identifying it as inspiring.[65] By December 2012, however these posts became so ubiquitous that it would inspire parodies.[65] It has also been suggested that the spread of such videos was inspired by the preceding popularity of the "We Are Number One" meme.[61]
Seinfeld himself said that he has no interest to make a sequel to Bee Movie in the wake of its online popularity. During a Reddit AMA in June 2016, a fan asked if a Bee Movie 2 would happen. Seinfeld had this to say,
- I considered it this spring for a solid six hours. There’s a fantastic energy now for some reason, on the internet particularly. Tumblr, people brought my attention to. I actually did consider it, but then I realized it would make Bee Movie 1 less iconic. But my kids want me to do it, a lot of people want me to do it. A lot of people that don’t know what animation is want me to do it. If you have any idea what animation is, you’d never do it.[67]
Trivia[]
- This is the 16th movie made by Dreamworks.
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