Bee Movie (2007)
Directed by Simon J. Smith
Barry B. Benson, a recent college graduate who wants more out of his life than making honey, decides to sue the human race after learning about the exploitation of bees at the hands of mankind. What will happen next?
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9 films that influenced Bee Movie
What critics say influenced Bee Movie
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.
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 .
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One minute it’s a more realistic, epic animated film in the vein of Ratatouille, the next it’s Space Jam.
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.
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).
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.
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The directors both have experience in the field, with Steve Hickner having been in charge of Prince of Egypt and Simon J. Smith having helmed Shrek 4-D (the 12-minute theme ride attraction at Universal Orlando), so everything is technically sound.