Film
Bee Movie
- Director
- Simon J Smith, Steve Hickner
- Certificate
- U
- Running Time
- 91 mins
Like so much second-division DreamWorks CGI animation, 2007’s Bee Movie is frantically paced, packed with already dated pop culture references, and struggles to bridge the gulf between kid-friendly gags (i.e. every bee pun you’ve ever heard) and more sophisticated humour for adults. It doesn’t help that the animation is decidedly mediocre by Pixar standards, while the oddly lumpy plot begins with Antz-style insect colony fun, takes an abrupt turn into courtroom drama and eco-parable, and winds up with an Airplane-esque airborne adventure that seems to have been tacked on to make up the running length. Weirdly, Jerry Seinfeld’s drone Barry B. Benson and Renee Zellweger as his human love interest Vanessa Bloome (no, the script can’t make that work either) are the least interesting characters in the film.
It opens strongly enough, depicting the hive as a highly mechanised and regimented honey factory (“Bees as a species haven’t had one day off in 27 million years!”) in which youngsters such as Barry are expected to choose a corporate role in which they’ll toil until they die. Being an adventurous sort, he buzzes off, breaks a Bee Law by talking to florist Vanessa, and launches a lawsuit against the human race for making bees “honey slaves to the white man”. There are a few sharp visual and verbal gags here (watch out for the Honron Corporation), but also a succession of dreary cameos which reaches its nadir when humour-vacuum Sting is called to the stand, accused of appropriating bee culture.
No attempt is made at generating the internal cartoon logic that made the contemporaneous Ratatouille such a delight, and subsequent plot developments reek of scriptwriter desperation. Thankfully, the mandatory casting of an African-American actor as the voice of a funky comedy sidekick brings us Chris Rock’s mosquito, of whom you’ll be yearning for more. “You’re a lawyer too?” asks a cow, who’s come to seek advice about milk theft. “Ma’am, I was already a blood-sucking parasite,” he quips. “All I needed was a briefcase.”
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s summer Bugs on Film season.
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