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A case for hives

An animated film that drones on and on

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 19th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
On a screen near you. Bugs serve as road kill in this tired animated film.
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Bee Movie

Directed by Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith
With the voices of Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Kathy Bates, Ray Liotta, Sting, Larry King.
Playing in English at Slovanský dům

With the advent of chewable vitamins and Fruity Pebbles, it was easy to forget that The Flintstones actually started life as a prime time adult cartoon, as a little “sponsored-by” post-show advert on YouTube reveals (www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqdTBDkUEEE)
But somewhere in its run, the Stone Age Honeymooners was deemed child’s fare, though many of the original cartoons that aired in the early ‘60s bore and baffle kids that watch them now. They intuitively realize that they aren’t the target audience.
Bee Movie, the computer-animated film co-written by Jerry Seinfeld (who also voices the lead character, bee-boy Barry B. Benson), feels equally confusing. Who is this film for? If it’s a kiddie show, then it comes complete with enough sexual innuendo to keep playgrounds giggling for months. If it’s for adults, then they would have to be the ones who, though unable to tie their shoes, are geniuses at complex maths theorems.
If it was meant to walk the line between two separate audiences, it slipped. It’s neither clever nor comical enough to keep everyone invested in what passes as a story.
Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) and his friend Adam (Matthew Broderick) have just graduated from school, and are being introduced, almost immediately, into the hive work world. When Barry learns that he is fated to become a honey drudge for life he panics, and decides to try his luck outside the hive with the “pollen jocks.”
His first excursion into the wider world is exhilarating, until he suddenly finds himself confronting the standard horrors and accidents that all insect life meets: windscreens, pesticide, and the rest of the brutal catalogue of human action.
At the point of being flattened by one of the film’s many product placements, Barry is saved by a kind-hearted florist, Vanessa (Renée Zellweger), who Barry falls in love with. As bees possess speech, he chats her up, and we sense the next hour will be a Beauty and the Bee. As this is Seinfeld, his parents naturally worry that she isn’t “beeish” enough for their son, and Adam cautions him with a tale of one of their friends who made the mistake of dating a wasp (or is that WASP?).
Suddenly, however, the film takes a turn toward the superior Chicken Run, when Barry bumbles upon the grim practices at factory honey farms. It becomes his mission, through legal action, to make it unlawful for any creature but bees to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
The little guy wins (how could he not with the voice of Oprah Winfrey possessing the presiding judge?), and so the worker bees of the world will never have to share their honey again. Unfortunately, with so much honey now at their disposal, hives become lazy, and nothing gets pollinated; the globe’s flowers and fruits begin to wither. Barry learns a valuable lesson about “upsetting the balance of nature.”
It is this last item that provoked the great critic Ron Rosenbaum to complain that Bee Movie was “childishly totalitarian,” when Barry realizes that it’s wiser to become “part of the hive mind” than to strike out as an individual. Worrisome indeed, were children actually still awake to be properly indoctrinated, but they have undoubtedly been lost since the film’s extended parody of The Graduate or the dull-witted interview segment with an apiarian Larry King (an American rent-a-personality available for bar mitzvahs, bridal showers and film cameos).
These last features indicate that Seinfeld and friends had delusions of this animated schtick being a match for The Simpsons, one brilliant cartoon that always knows who it’s addressing. But no amount of celeb guest spots (Sting, of course, wouldn’t you know) and attempts at topicality can mask Bee Movie’s inadequacies.
The humor, aside from the groan-inducing jokes, is dependent upon anthropomorphizing hive life. The animation is as sophisticated as the Dreamwork machinery that churned it out, but this type of animation begins to look drearily the same after awhile. The most exciting work is the yU+co end titles, the same company responsible for the clever opening titles for Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty.
Poor Seinfeld, though. Nine years after his show and his career is still dormant.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (19/12/2007):

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