The buzz factor

Stars have long done voices for animated features. It’s good pay, short hours, and they can skip makeup. With ‘‘Bee Movie,’’ which opens Friday, Jerry Seinfeld has upped the ante, putting his imagination where his mouth is. Not only does he star, he co-wrote the movie and helped produce it.

‘‘I’m sure audiences will just think, ‘Oh, this is another one of those cute little GGI movies,’.’’ Seinfeld said during a recent visit to Boston to promote the film. ‘‘But behind the scenes this was a very big undertaking for me, to learn this new medium and to try to bring my comedy to it. ..... It’s a silly little thing, but everything I do is a silly little thing.’’

Silly ‘‘Bee Movie’’ may be. Little it’s not.

The story of Barry (Seinfeld), a bee who decides to leave his hive and is befriended by a florist (Renee Zellweger), ‘‘Bee Movie’’ traces his shock at discovering people ‘‘steal’’ honey from hives and eat it. Outraged, he files a lawsuit against the human race. Other voices include Matthew Broderick, as Barry’s best friend; Oprah Winfrey, as the judge who presides over the trial; x and, playing himself, Sting (get it?). Also heard in small roles are the voices of old ‘‘Seinfeld’’ friends Patrick Warburton and Michael Richards.

‘‘An animated movie normally has 30 sequences, 30 locations, 30 speaking parts, maximum,’’ said Simon J. Smith, who co-directed ‘‘Bee Movie’’ with Steve Hickner. ‘‘We were 75 speaking parts, 65 locations, and 40 sequences. So that’s one and a half, two movies already, before you started.’’

Smith, who along with Hick8ner accompanied Seinfeld on the promotional visit, noted that ‘‘Bee Movie’’ was four years in the making. Ultimately, he said, ‘‘There were 212 versions of the script. That’s the advantage we had [working with Seinfeld], and it was huge, having one of the producers, the lead character, and the writer in the room at the same time.’’

‘‘This was never a part-time job for Jerry,’’ Hickner agreed. ‘‘He immersed himself in it every day.’’

How much immersed? Seinfeld noted that he has ‘‘like three feet of books about bees’’ in his library and that he twice got stung while doing research. ‘‘A guy was trying to show me the queen, for some reason,’’ he said.

It’s been a decade since ‘‘Seinfeld’’ went off the air, though you wouldn’t know it from the ubiquity of reruns and DVD issues (both ‘‘.‘Seinfeld’: Complete Series Box’’ and the show’s ninth season debut on disc Nov. 6). Although Seinfeld has kept busy doing stand-up, as well as starring in and producing a 2002 documentary, ‘‘Comedian,’’ his main concerns have been domestic. Married in 1999, he and his wife now have three children.

In person, Seinfeld very much resembles the man on his namesake sitcom — which makes perfect sense for someone who became famous playing himself. He’s intelligent, collected, and faintly quizzical. There’s the same slightly cocky nonchalance that for nine seasons kept at bemused bay the meshugas of George, Kramer, and Elaine.

Seinfeld’s comedy has always been highly verbal. Yet animation puts a premium on the visual. That’s part of what drew him to animation, he said.

‘‘I’ve actually always wanted to express myself visually. But stand-up, obviously, doesn’t lend itself to it. Even a television show, there really isn’t the time or the facilities — you can’t do cinematography on a sitcom. I’ve always wanted to see if I could let my visual imagination run wild. What would I do? So that was one of the things I really loved about doing this.

‘‘Four years ago, when we started, I think only 25 of these [CGI] movies had been made. It’s still very new. I loved the look of it. And I just really wanted to change the way the characters talked from the ones I had seen. I wanted to put my spin on it. I thought that would be a good combination, the CGI look with my tone.’’

Hickner said he believes that just as there’s a certain characteristic tone to Seinfeld’s comedy, there’s a certain structure, too, and that both inform ‘‘Bee Movie.’’

‘‘This was Jerry’s type of storytelling,’’ Hickner said. ‘‘If you watch the show, it has a lot of 30-second, one-minute scenes, and he took that type of working and put it in an animated movie, which doesn’t normally work like that.’’

Seinfeld’s interest in animation is both longstanding and broad. ‘‘I have always been a fan,’’ he said. ‘‘I like claymation and ventriloquism and marionettes and ‘Wallace and Gromit.’ I love ‘Kipper,’ ‘Charlie and Lola’ — that’s the stuff I watch now with the kids. I love the old Disney stuff and Warner Bros.; that stuff always made me laugh. I always thought it was a fun medium. It’s purely comedic in its form. It’s just like you’re waiting for a joke always when you’re watching a cartoon. It’s just like it feels funny.’’

Described that way, animation almost sounds like stand-up. Seinfeld agreed that the two were similar, at least for him.

‘‘I approach everything like stand-up, actually. Even the movie. Every line in the movie is there to set up a joke at some point. That’s the same way we approached the TV show. It was really like a 20-minute stand-up act. Everything is here to create something funny, although I think the movie went into some other places for me. ..... In a 20-minute sitcom the relationships are really there just to serve as comedy. But in this story the relationships get a little more important because they go through more trials and tribulations together.’’

According to Seinfeld, the experience of working with animation was both liberating and burdensome. ‘‘In the matter of half an hour,’’ he said, ‘‘you can do the same scene 10 or 15 times. With film and cameras, you can do it two or three times, and that’s it. I did over 300 recording sessions, because I was there every day. So I’d just walk across the hall and try something else. Certain aspects of it have amazing freedom. Certain aspects are very restrictive. In terms of how long it takes to see something once you’ve visualized it, it takes a very long time to see it. Then if you see it and you’re not happy with it, it takes a long time to redo it. ..... It’s a% very technical medium, obviously, and I had to learn the whole language of it. And now I know every single job at DreamWorks Animation.’’

Clearly, Seinfeld remains smitten with animation. Now that he’s become an expert as well as a fan, might that mean more animated features are on the way? What does he have lined up next?

‘‘Absolutely nothing,’’ Seinfeld said with a pleased look. ‘‘I never plan anything. I just walk out the door.’’

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.