Bee Movie
If you're like me, you're heading into "Bee Movie" with your guard up. All that "Bee Movie Jr." hype for one more cookie-cutter computer-animated family flick? Why should we pay good money because Jerry Seinfeld wants to buy his kids a movie? Couldn't he just rent Disney World for a year?
So I'm surprised to report that, about 15 minutes in, "Bee Movie" started getting both to me and to my companion, a jaded 10-year-old who has seen more than her fill of limp "Shrek" sequels. The movie's not even close to
"Bee Movie" begins in an anonymous hive in which honeybee Barry B. Benson (voiced by Seinfeld) and best friend Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick) graduate high school and immediately face a drone's life at the Honex Corp. (a division of HonexCo and part of the Hexagon Group). Barry rebels and joins the macho Pollen Jocks for an outside reconnaissance.
These opening scenes are nothing special - "Antz" with a "Monsters, Inc." factory backdrop - but once Barry soars out of the hive into Central Park, the movie starts to soar with him.
The screenwriters - Seinfeld, two "Seinfeld" writers, and some other guy - have been smart enough to stick to Manhattan's Upper West Side, and "Bee Movie" turns into a shiny-happy vision of Jerry's old stomping grounds, psychologically and comedically. There's no Soup Nazi here, but there is a Honey Nazi, and he is us.
Barry immediately befriends a human named Vanessa (Renée Zellweger), a sharp-witted florist who takes a talking bee in stride (she's a New Yorker, she's seen everything). No, it doesn't make any sense, but quit your carping. Back at the hive, his parents (Barry Levinson and Kathy Bates) fret about this unseen new girlfriend: Is she Bee-ish? She'd better not be a WASP.
Then Barry discovers that humans sell honey in stores, exploiting his people's endless toil. Outraged - "This is stealing! And it's on sale!?" - he does what any self-respecting New Yorker would do but that, to my knowledge, no hero of a Pixar or DreamWorks Animation movie has ever contemplated.
He sues the human race.
"Bee Movie" gets seriously silly at this point, dragging in John Goodman to voice a Foghorn Leghorn-style opposing attorney in a headline-grabbing trial. Sting (voiced by Sting) also takes his lumps, as does actor Ray Liotta (Ray Liotta), who, for reasons unfathomable yet very funny, markets his own brand of Private Select honey in the film.
Not everything works. A subplot involving Vanessa's high-maintenance boyfriend, played by Patrick Warburton (Puddy!), is more frantic than amusing, and the story line will seem increasingly preposterous even to the ankle-biters. Yet there's something soothing about hearing those Seinfeld inflections again - that high, disbelieving tenor - and enough of the dialogue has a Roz Chast-style topspin that takes it out of the dreary genre ordinary. (Required to fly a jumbo jet in one scene, Barry asks, "Isn't John Travolta a pilot? How hard can it be?") Plus: Chris Rock as a mosquito gets off the best lawyer joke of 2007.
On a side note, I'd been questioning the wisdom of releasing a cute l'il bee cartoon at a time when actual honeybee populations are inexplicably crashing around the planet. (I know, I know, it's a kids' movie. Call me Captain Bringdown.) Is this a case of the pop culture fiddling while hives burn? A Discovery Channel documentary it's not, but "Bee Movie" does at least address what would happen if our apine friends stopped pollinating in such a manner as to spook the little ones without throwing them into blind panic.
It's not a pretty sight: The colors bleed out of this bright Playskool movie, leaving a dead and wintry wasteland. Point taken. Then "Bee Movie" makes everything right in such magical fashion that it wouldn't fool a child, and maybe that's the point, too. Ten-year-old companion leaned over to me during this scene and muttered, "Dad, it wouldn't happen that fast."
No, honey, it wouldn't. But we can talk about that on the ride home.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@ globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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