In Defence of The Bee Movie (2007)

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible…

Twist! This is a joke (of an internet meme! Am I creating inception?) There are many other ways you can find The Bee Movie script if you wish to, but this is not the place. I am highly aware of how this bee-log-post is titled, this might come across as a joke. In conjunction with RemoteWatch “Animation Has Layers” episode, I wanna talk about why I resonate with parts of The Bee Movie so much, and why many of us could find some comfort in this film as well (also, calling this a film may bother many auteurs out there, but at the end of the day, it is a film)

In the unlikely case that anyone has forgotten, The Bee Movie (2007) is an animated movie produced by Dreamworks, the parent company of many meme-able, family favourite animated movies such as Shrek, and The Boss Baby. So it’s no surprise that The Bee Movie is also subject to many internet hijinks, especially in its sudden popularity surge in 2016 memes, which spawned masterpieces such as The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster, and all of its sister variants of edits and modified trailers.

Here’s a quick rundown of the plot: Barry B. Benson, (voiced by Jerry Seinfeld, who also co-wrote the film) a bee who can’t wait to get a head start workforce. Except, there’s a catch: the career he picks will be the only job he can do for the rest of his life. He then embarks on an adventure to the outside world of NYC where he meets Vanessa Bloom, (voiced by Renée Zellweger) a human florist. Soon, they form a relationship (a bee-lationship, if you will), sue the human race for their consumption of honey, and disrupt Earth’s entire ecosystem. Totally normal things.

I initially started writing this with the intention that I related to Barry’s existentialism. I can relate to his desire to work in life and be more than just one thing, but he has to pick and stay at one job for the rest of his life until the day he dies. As a disillusioned member of society, fresh out of Class of 2020 with a Law degree, the workforce I am entering is a highly competitive one that would bee exploiting me, devaluing me, and ultimately not the only thing I want to do in life.

However, as I go down the rabbit hole of analysing this movie, it actually speaks to criticise a much bigger structural problem. What initially centres on a bee’s dissatisfaction with the status quo and innate desire to change the overarching structure that was against him, he finds the ugly reality of the unsafe work conditions of bees being oppressed and exploited for their honey by unethical beekeepers.

This is a movie that we can all connect with. As the younger generation growing into a broken society that’s left us with the worst climate crisis we are facing, a place where the wealth accrued by the top 1% of the world could fix world poverty, and never-ending kleptocracy by world leaders who will never have to face the consequences that trickle down into issues faced by the general population. We would all want radical change to fix all these things.

Except it’s not so simple: while Barry was able to enact radical change through (I can’t beelieve this is a legitimate sentence) winning a lawsuit against the human race, the outcome led to bees losing their sense of purpose due to themselves having no longer needing to work. Their daily menial tasks once gave them meaning and structure, but now that they have all the honey, their sense of self and what made them feel meaningful is lost now they no longer contribute to society. So they revert back to the original system, making the initial revolution kind of pointless.

My takeaway on a personal level is that maybee I am reaching and not everyone questions the system the way I do, or people are perfectly happy with their lives, working at one job as is. In our modern day society, it’s too idealistic to be able to pin all our problems on one party and sue them and win all the money to spend the rest of our lives pondering our existence.

But am I saying that it’s pointless for us to try and change the way the system works? Of course not! This is not a movie to take lessons from. I mean, the conversations that usually come up about this movie revolves around interspecies romance: how and why does a human woman want to be with a bee? I have no answer or defense for this.

But overall, what I will say is, maybe don’t dismiss The Bee Movie so quickly as a nonsensical kids cartoon.