Authorized newspaper of Fort Lewis, Washington
Jerry Seinfeld brings his A-game to “Bee Movie.” To a picture pulsing with bright gumdrop colors, he brings a sharp comic sensibility that adds edge to what otherwise might have been a too-sweet animated treat.
Though clever, the picture, a DreamWorks production, doesn’t have the kind of sustained inventiveness and engaging spiritedness in its storytelling found in movies from Pixar, still the gold standard in Hollywood animation.
Seinfeld plays a bee – What else? – a blue-eyed fast talker named Barry who’s bugged by what he perceives to be the limited career opportunities for an insect of his ilk.
Work till you drop in the hive making honey, day in and day out? Where’s the fun and fulfillment in that? His best buddy, a bee named Adam (voiced by Matthew Broderick, a best bud of Seinfeld in real life), offers only that such drudgery has been the bee way of life for millions of years. Barry, he says, should get with the program and conform.
No way, says our boy Barry, who goes buzzing off out into the big world outside (downtown Manhattan, as it happens). Breaking the No. 1 rule of beedom – don’t talk to humans – he sweet-talks his way into a kind-of romance with a kindhearted human florist (voiced by Renée Zellweger).
Soon after, Barry gets his bee britches all in a bunch when his newfound beloved takes him to a supermarket where he discovers that humans bottle and sell honey. Worse yet, they do so without offering any compensation for beedom’s most prized product. Worse yet, the product is packaged in bottles in the shape of a bear, the age-old nemesis of bees. In a snit, Barry decides to sue humanity for helping itself to something it has no right to have.
Interspecies romance. Insect litigation. Big blue eyes on a bee. Talk about breaking the mold.
It all makes for a quip-a-minute dive into bee life as imagined by Seinfeld, who co-wrote and co-produced the film with experienced animation directors Stephen Hickner and Simon J. Smith.
The visuals dazzle, particularly flight scenes that follow Barry and his hivemates as they zoom over a candy-colored Central Park.
Seinfeld works in an environmental message, centering on what would happen if bees decided to chuck their workaholic ways and abandon their passion for pollination. Hint: It ain’t pretty.
It’s the Seinfeldian zingers that give the picture its comic punch. Among those zinged and dinged are Seinfeld celebrity pals such as Larry King and Sting, the latter taken to task in a courtroom scene for misappropriating a favorite bee term for his stage name.
Mercurial Ray Liotta comes in for special treatment for his hot-tempered temperament. A good sport, that Ray. Seinfeld’s send-up depicts him as a total egomaniac, clutching the Emmy he won for his work in an episode of “ER” and raving like a loon.
The Liotta scenes and several other bits come across as such inside jokes that few of the film’s younger viewers will get them.
The harshness of the jabs it takes as some of its comic targets are signs of a comedy that is a little cold at the core. Mostly though, it’s a lark. And for this “Bee Movie,” that’s not bad. Not bad at all.
Bee Movie * * *
Directors: Stephen Hickner and Simon J. Smith
Cast: Featuring the voices of Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman and Chris Rock
Running Time: 1:31
Rating: PG; mildly risqué humor
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