Barry B. Benson, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld, is a hip, young honey bee in the animated comedy Bee Movie. (Dreamworks Pictures)
Nine years of Seinfeld and its infinite afterlife in syndication make it easy to forget that the real Jerry Seinfeld is not the same guy as TV’s Jerry Seinfeld.
TV Jerry is a caustic misanthrope, someone who makes out during Schindler’s List and dumps a woman because she has man hands. Real Jerry is much gentler and wants to be loved; he’s a wry observer of voice-mail etiquette and a ridiculer of airplane food. Real Jerry wouldn’t balk at wearing a puffy shirt on TV. Real Jerry goes to the Cannes Film Festival and gets hoisted into the air wearing a bee costume. Real Jerry pimps his new animated feature Bee Movie on 30 Rock, on Oprah and in increasingly grating NBC interstitials. TV Jerry was forever cringing. Real Jerry is shameless.Those hoping that Bee Movie might revive some of that dark TV Jerry humour — prepare to be disappointed. There are a few flashes of the Seinfeld of yore — Patrick Warburton, who played Elaine’s high-fiving, face-painting, Ziggy-loving boyfriend David Puddy plays an equally buffoonish guy in the movie — but mainly this aptly named film, while amiable and entertaining, is Real Jerry material: pleased with itself and reluctant to surprise or offend.
Seinfeld stars as Barry B. Benson, a young bee chafing at the confines of his cheerful, clock-punching, Seussian hive, where “bees work their whole lives to get to the place where they can work their whole lives.” His doting, kvetchy parents (Kathy Bates and Barry Levinson) pester him to settle down with a nice “bee-ish” girl; his best friend, Adam (Matthew Broderick), is content to spend his days as a purposeful drone.
Barry leaps at the chance to venture out of his hive with the alpha-male Pollen Jocks, a zippy sequence that delivers a delightful, Crayola-hued bees-eye view of Central Park and the congested streets of Manhattan. Outside, he befriends Vanessa (Renee Zellweger), a loopy charmer of a florist only momentarily nonplussed by the appearance of a talking bee. Barry also discovers that humans have been stealing honey from bees, cultivating artificial hive work houses with bee slaves and packaging the fruits of their hard-earned labour into — insult of all insults — containers shaped like bears, one of the bee’s worst enemies. Barry’s quest to right this injustice offers a sweet — and timely — lesson in ecology and the importance of the collective.
Along the way, there are plenty of good gags, from the clever reference to The Graduate to a classic Seinfeldian dig at Larry King. But, like the Shrek franchise and other contemporary cartoon features, Bee Movie is more interested in amusing post-modern parents than their under-12 offspring. Unless my four-year-old is the only kid left in the world who still thinks calling someone “Mr. Bum-Bum” is the height of hilarity, most of Bee Movie’s jokes will soar over young viewers’ heads. (Then again, maybe Ray Liotta parodies are really popular among the playground set.)
For all its laughs, Bee Movie is oddly inert. Despite its emphasis on the fragility of the environment and the dangers of insect life, the film never conveys the feeling that anything is really at stake. If only there had been a little more of Chris Rock, who has one inspired, off-the-wall — or make that off-the-windshield — scene channeling mosquito weltschmerz with his distinctive whiny rasp.
None of these failings would matter so much if Bee Movie had the heart of Finding Nemo or the exquisite visual thrills of Ratatouille — or even the twisted absurdity of Seinfeld.
Bee Movie opens across Canada on Nov. 2.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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