Simon J. Smith
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Great scene: A sly parody of the swimming pool scene from "The Graduate."
They're remaking The Graduate with bees?
At its core, the story is a play on The Graduate, with just-graduated Barry pressured by his suspiciously Jewish-seeming parents (Kathy Bates and Barry Levinson) to choose a job and settle into a hive existence; there's even a pool scene patterned on the Mike Nichols classic.
Resisting his drone-ish destiny as a drone (his post-college floating in the pool under his parents’ (Kathy Bates and Barry Levinson) anxious gazes recalls The Graduate), Barry discusses options with his best friend Adam (Matthew Broderick) (who, by the way, embraces his own destiny, signing up for an assembly line sort of job rather than imagine beyond the norm).
Seinfeld voices Barry B. Benson, a new college grad (in accelerated bee time, it takes three days to earn a degree) who is still pondering his future, like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate.
In this regard, the film parodies "The Graduate," and that's also a cute bit, but, of course, it will go right over the head of any youngster.
Between "A Bug's Life," "Antz," "The Ant Bully," and the others, the concept has been done to death.
If it helps, we weren't that impressed, either, when Woody Allen tried to be an ant in "Antz."
As he notes the paradoxes of his airborne “fat little body” and his resilient individualism thriving in the hive, Barry sets up what looks to be Antz again, a series of adventures wherein the neurotic New Yorker finds unexpected happiness in formula.
Before it heads into litigious spheres, Bee Movie's plot closely hews to that of Antz and other animated insect fare where a lone bug tries to break free of a conformist society.
Actually, Bee Movie is a lot like Antz except with a younger multi-millionaire mensch substituting for Woody Allen.
The travel sequences and overwrought adventures recall DreamWorks’ dreary Penguins of Madagascar, and Minions suffers from many of the same problems.
“Minions” is a straight-up crowd pleaser and reminded me an awful lot of another quality movie featuring scene-stealers from another franchise, “Penguins of Madagascar.”
It’s a ploy that didn’t work terribly well for the “Penguins of Madagascar,” and fares even worse in this case, though young kids may enjoy the hullabaloo of what amounts to a manic but rarely inspired prequel—cinematic hamburger rather than filet minion.
As with “Penguins of Madagascar,” it attempts to take the hilarious sidekicks from an animated series and put them center stage.
Like the Penguins of Madagascar before them, these Minions spun off (from the mega-popular Despicable Me films) don't so much go on an adventure, in their own solo movie, as run a fool's errand.
Not as strange or funny as “Penguins of Madagascar,” the “Despicable Me” offshoot chases a series that already included octopi guns and shrunken elephants, not to mention its lovable baddie’s vast army of baby babbling yellow whatzits.
The last time bees had so much buzz on screen was in 2007 when the animated film Bee Movie was released (it also had a resurgence in 2016). Written by and starring Jerry Seinfeld, the Bee Movie portrays bees as class conscious, fighting for direct access to their honey and a fair system to be compensated. The Beekeeper contains a similar message of egalitarian struggle, but it isn’t so much a collective goal as a single man’s plan for payback in a society that ignores its elderly.
It lifts ideas from sources as disparate as "Finding Nemo" and "The Graduate" without ever really finding its own groove.
The first third of the film is fairly commonplace, as far as animated films go, working from the same basic blueprint as Monsters Inc. or Finding Nemo—talking critters inhabit a world that bears strong resemblance to the human world, and all of them are happy and content to maintain the status quo, right up until one boat-rocking maverick experiences life outside the bubble and realizes that there's something bigger and better out there, and things can never again be the same.
Between "A Bug's Life," "Antz," "The Ant Bully," and the others, the concept has been done to death.
The plot is one part “A Bug’s Life,” and one part… courtroom drama.
For every Antz , there's a much better A Bug's Life .
One minute it’s a more realistic, epic animated film in the vein of Ratatouille, the next it’s Space Jam.
Shark Tale , Bee Movie , Over the Hedge , the Madagascar pictures and the Shrek films are OK movies with OK animation, but there's a certain charm missing from them that's ever-present in Pixar's work, and even some of Sony and Fox's animated titles (though many films at these two studios are genuinely awful).
While their rivals at Pixar are turning out pictures that transcend the limitations of the form and rank among the best of all recent cinema, Dreamworks has turned out a steady stream of profitable but formulaic efforts like Bee Movie , Shark Tale , and the endless, witless Shrek and Madagascar franchises.
The directors are Simon J. Smith, the voice behind the blind mouse in Shrek, and Steve Hickner, one in the bunch who begat The Prince of Egypt.
Directors Steve Hickner (The Prince of Egypt) and Simon J. Smith might be credited with a rare, inspired visual gag: the beehive hairdo actually made me laugh.
This has resulted in their work ranging from animated classics like the How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda franchises to lesser efforts like Bee Movie and The Boss Baby .
Where a Pixar effort like The Incredibles jam-packed all of its grown-up references into its first 10 minutes, Bee Movie hems and haws from the start, offering not one but three swooping chase scenes in an attempt to placate the kids before settling into a tepid quasi-romance between Barry and insect-friendly florist Vanessa (Renée Zellweger, drawn to look like an even-more-robotic Jennifer Aniston).
But like Jerry Seinfeld's Barry B. Benson in the stingless Bee Movie, it's also hard to accept the character as a unique personality.
Familiar from other Dreamworks Animation releases, the Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox (HD) contains short music videos from earlier films, including Bee Movie , the Shrek films, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge , and Madagascar .
While Shrek became an instant classic making fun of other classics while itself following the same formula, the sequels have been composed of rapid-fire pop-culture gags substituted for story; the same can be said for Madagascar (although those penguins are pretty entertaining all by themselves), Bee Movie , and especially Shark Tale .
But here it is: I prefer "Kung Fu Panda" to any of the "Shreks," along with moderately diverting entertainments such as "Bee Movie," plus more grating items such as "Madagascar," "Shark Tale" and "Over the Hedge."
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Penguins of Madagascar (2014)
The chase scenes in Steven Spielberg’s inert “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011) may be more technically brilliant, but who cared?
First-time feature director Joel Crawford (who worked in the animation departments on such films as Bee Movie, all three Kung Fu Panda movies, Trolls and the second LEGO Movie) has a real gift for keeping things colorful, kinetic, emotionally honest, and damn funny, in varying doses.
A classic Disney cartoon like, say, "Bambi" may contain just 15 sequences - half the number in a modern CGI like "Toy Story."
It morphs from the bee version of Toy Story into some sort of wacky Looney Tunes cartoon, complete with John Goodman doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression as opposing council and an erratic plane crash sequence governed by the laws of Bug Bunny-style physics.
Hell, even the films ‘save the environment’ message was already done in Bee Movie.
Somewhere out there in America, some young movie fan is going to watch The Dead Don’t Die because they like Bill Murray and zombies almost as much as they like Bacon and Bee Movie memes.
Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie was actually a much funnier and more ingenious comedy about cartoon creatures suing corporate behemoths.
He nurses a weird post- Bee Movie interspecies crush on a human.
But though the rubbery DreamWorks look has gotten a lot more idiosyncratic and artistically ambitious since the days of Bee Movie and Shark Tale , the studio remains addicted to the formulae and be-your-self-isms of generic kiddie fare.