By Curt Schleier

Honey, hive you heard the positive buzz about Jerry Seinfeld’s BEE MOVIE? 

It’s all true. And for the record, by BEE MOVIE we’re not referring to the cheap productions that used to accompany the main features.  No, this is a film about insects, who are industrious and apparently very funny.

The story centers on Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), who lives with his cousins in a hive in the Sheep Meadow in New York City’s Central Park.  He’s young, impressionable and notices everything.  When he attends his school graduation ceremony, for example, he sees the crowd, hears the music and is amazed at the “pomp, under the circumstances.”  (I will not be explaining any jokes. If you didn’t get that one, move on.  There are plenty more where that came from.)

Normally at this point in Barry’s life he’d have to pick the job he’d work at for the rest of his life.  But Barry is curious about the outside world and afraid he’d be bored doing just one thing.  So, on a dare, he goes out with the pollen collecting crew and discovers a whole world out there.  He meets a Manhattan florist, Vanessa (Renee Zellweger), who saves his life.  Her rotten boyfriend Ken (Patrick Warburton) was about to squash him when Vanessa came to the rescue.

Barry then does the unthinkable.  He breaks one of beedom’s most stringent rules.  He speaks to Vanessa.  Many of you may be unaware that bees speak English – quite fluently, as it turns out. That is because most bees – unlike Barry – obey the rules.


In any event, woman and bee form a warm interspecies friendship.  Even Benson’s best friend Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick) is impressed when Barry brings him a crumb from a piece of cake Vanessa shared with him.  “And that’s not even what they eat,” Barry explains.  “It’s what falls off what they eat.”

Barry hears a call to arms when Vanessa takes him shopping and he sees jars of honey on supermarket shelves.  He wants to know, why humans are selling bee products?  He makes his way out to a bee farm and looks at the artificial man-made hives where bees are induced to produce honey for human consumption.  He’s stung (that’s my pun, not the films) by a photo he sees hanging on the hive wall of the queen bee with a two-day growth of beard.  That, Barry says, must be a drag queen.  (That’s a film joke, not mine.)

Angered by the way these bees are treated, he sues humans for the return of bees’ honey – and wins.  But be careful what you sue for.  With more honey than they can possibly use, the bees become lazy. They no longer pollinate plants.  Central Park goes gray and Vanessa is out of business.

Understandably disturbed by what he has wrought, Barry accompanies his human friend to the last Rose Bowl parade where they plan to hijack a float, return to New York and use its flowers to pollinate Central Park.  There are problems, however.  The pilots are knocked unconscious and Vanessa must land the plane.  Fortunately, she has the assistants of millions of bees, who bring her to a safe landing before the flowers spoil.

There is of course a happy ending. Vanessa reopens her shop in partnership with Barry.  Barry also opens a law practice with Mooseblood (Chris Rock), a mosquito he met on his journeys.  A mosquito as a lawyer?  That shouldn’t surprise you.  As Mooseblood puts it:

 “I was already a blood-sucking parasite; all I needed was a briefcase.”

Technically the film is superb.  The computer-generated animation is startlingly lifelike.  I knew it was a cartoon, yet when it looked like Barry was going to be splattered over the windshield of an 18-wheeler, I jumped in my seat.


The children at the screening I attended seemed to like the movie, too  They didn’t laugh as much as I did, but then BEE MOVIE is as much for adults as kids.  It’s hard to tell whether the youngsters got Seinfeld’s underlying messages: the importance of teamwork, that every job is important and should be done well.

But I suspect many adults didn’t get the message intended for them, either.  Bee populations in this country are being wiped out.  No one knows whether it a parasite (other than Mooseblood and other attorneys), changing weather patterns or another cause.  But our food supply is threatened.  So on that level, the film could not have been timelier.

Seinfeld fans will love the movie.  It is written and performed with his sensibilities and timing.  But the film works beeutifully even for those who may never have heard of him.