Bee Movie | |
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Directed by | |
Written by | |
Produced by |
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Starring |
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Edited by | Nick Fletcher |
Music by | Rupert Gregson-Williams |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release dates |
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Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $150 million [1] |
Box office | $293.5 million [1] |
Bee Movie is a 2007 American animated comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and Columbus 81 Productions, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner (in the former's feature directorial debut) from a screenplay by the writing team of Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder and Andy Robin, it stars the voices of Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Patrick Warburton, and Chris Rock. The film centers on Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a honey bee who tries to sue the human race for exploiting bees after learning from his new florist friend Vanessa Bloome (Zellweger) that humans sell and consume honey.
Bee Movie debuted in New York City on October 25, 2007, and was released in theaters in the United States on November 2. It received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its humor and voice cast but criticized its plot and lack of originality, and was a box-office disappointment, grossing $293.5 million worldwide on a budget of $150 million. Nevertheless, it has since gathered a cult following, partly driven by memes of the film shared on social media, which most often lampoon the film's premise, script and celebrity cameos.
Barry B. Benson, an idealistic honey bee who has the ability to talk to humans, has recently graduated from college and is about to enter the hive's honey-making workforce, Honex Industries, with his best friend, Adam Flayman. Barry is initially excited, but his ambitious, insubordinate attitude emerges upon discovering that his choice of job will never change once picked. Later, the two bees run into a group of pollen jocks, bees who collect pollen from flowers outside the hive, and they offer to take Barry with them if he is "bee enough". While on his first pollen-gathering expedition in New York City, Barry gets lost in the rain, and ends up on the windowsill of a human florist named Vanessa Bloome. Upon noticing Barry, Vanessa's boyfriend Ken attempts to squash him, but Vanessa gently catches and releases Barry outside, saving his life.
Barry later returns to express his gratitude to Vanessa, breaking the sacred law that bees are not to communicate with humans. Barry and Vanessa develop a close friendship, bordering on attraction, and spend time together. When he and Vanessa are in a grocery store, Barry discovers that the humans have been stealing and eating the bees' honey for centuries. He decides to journey to Honey Farms, which supplies the grocery store with its honey. Incredulous at the poor treatment of the bees in the hives, including the use of bee smokers to incapacitate colonies, Barry decides to sue the human race to put an end to exploitation of the bees, with Vanessa agreeing to help.
Barry's mission attracts wide attention from bees and humans alike, with countless spectators attending the trial. Although Barry is up against tough defense attorney Layton T. Montgomery, the trial's first day goes well. That evening, Barry is having dinner with Vanessa when Ken shows up. Vanessa leaves the room, and Ken expresses to Barry that he hates the pair spending time together. When Barry leaves to use the restroom, Ken ambushes and attempts to kill him, only for Vanessa to intervene and break up with Ken. The second day at the trial, Montgomery unleashes an unrepentant character assassination against the bees, leading a deeply offended Adam to sting him. Montgomery immediately exaggerates the stinging to make himself seem the victim of an assault while simultaneously tarnishing Adam. Adam's actions jeopardize the bees' credibility and his life, though he recovers. The third day, Barry wins the trial by exposing the jury to the torturous treatment of bees, particularly use of the smoker, and prevents humans from stealing honey from bees ever again. Having lost the trial, Montgomery cryptically warns Barry that a negative shift of nature is imminent.
Sure enough, with Honex stopping honey production and all bees, including the vitally important pollen jocks put out of a job, all the world's flowers begin to die out without any pollination. Before long, the last remaining flowers on earth are being stockpiled in Pasadena, California, intended for the last Tournament of Roses Parade. Barry and Vanessa travel to the parade and steal a float, which they load onto a plane. They hope to bring the flowers to the bees so they can re-pollinate the world's last remaining flowers. When the plane's captain explains that the flight will be delayed due to bad weather, Barry attempts to talk to the pilots, only for them to knock each other out while attempting to kill Barry. With help from Barry and the bees from Barry's hive, Vanessa is able to land the plane safely.
Barry becomes a member of the pollen jocks, and they fly off to a flower patch. Armed with the pollen of the last flowers, Barry and the Pollen Jocks reverse the damage and save the world's plants, restarting the bees' honey production. Later on, Barry runs a law firm at Vanessa's flower shop titled "Insects at Law", which handles disputes between animals and humans. While selling flowers to customers, Vanessa offers certain brands of honey that are "bee-approved".
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The development of Bee Movie began in 2003, when Steven Spielberg approached DreamWorks Animation CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg after Jerry Seinfeld asked him to make an animated film featuring insects. Seinfeld spent a week in Los Angeles working on it. Teleconferencing system HP Halo was installed in Seinfeld's office in New York, enabling him to work on the film and interact between coasts. Seinfeld said he set the film in New York because it was "the Tigris and Euphrates of comedy", and Katzenberg was the main reason for making the film. [2] The budget was approximately $150 million. [1] Spielberg was in two live-action trailers of this film in November 2006 and early 2007 where he interacted with Seinfeld, who wore a bee costume.
The 91-minute film Bee Movie debuted in New York City on October 25, 2007, [1] [3] followed by a premiere on October 28, in Los Angeles. [4] It was released in the United States on November 2. [5] The film was produced by DreamWorks Animation and Columbus 81 Productions, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. [6] [7] Bee Movie Game was released in October 2007 for multiple platforms. [8]
Paramount Home Entertainment released Bee Movie on DVD (single- and double-disc) on March 11, 2008, [9] and on Blu-ray on May 20. [10] The DVD extras include the "Inside the Hive: The Cast of Bee Movie" and "Tech of Bee Movie" featurettes, "We Got the Bee" music video, "Meet Barry B. Benson" feature, interactive games, a filmmaker commentary, alternate endings, lost scenes, the live-action trailers, and Jerry's Flight Over Cannes. [9] [11] An HD DVD version of the film was canceled after the discontinuation of that format. [12]
Bee Movie earned $126.6 million in the United States and Canada and $166.9 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $293.5 million. [1] DreamWorks Animation reported that the film made $27.3 million in home media revenues. [13]
The film was released with American Gangster and Martian Child on November 2, 2007. [1] [14] Bee Movie earned $10.2 million on its first day. The film debuted at second earning $39.1 million from 3,928 theaters. [15] Its second weekend earnings dropped by 32 percent to $26 million, [16] [17] and followed by another $14.3 million the third weekend. [18] Bee Movie completed its theatrical run in the United States and Canada on February 14, 2008. [19]
Bee Movie has an approval rating of 50% based on 173 professional reviews on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 5.6/10. Its critical consensus reads, "Bee Movie has humorous moments, but its awkward premise and tame delivery render it mostly forgettable." [20] Metacritic (which uses a weighted average) assigned Bee Movie a score of 54 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". [21] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale. [22]
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "It's on the easygoing level of Surf's Up , and a full tick up from, say, Over the Hedge or The Ant Bully . But given the Seinfeld pedigree it's something of a disappointment." [23] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three out of four stars, saying "At its relaxed best, when it's about, well, nothing, the slyly comic Bee Movie is truly beguiling." [24] Desson Thomson of The Washington Post said, "Bee Movie feels phoned in on every level. The images, usually computer animation's biggest draw, are disappointingly average. And as for the funny stuff, well, that's where you were supposed to come in." [25]
A. O. Scott of The New York Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "The most genuinely apian aspect of Bee Movie is that it spends a lot of its running time buzzing happily around, sniffing out fresh jokes wherever they may bloom." [26] Claudia Puig gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is certainly not low-budget, but it has all the staying power and creative value of a B-movie. The secret life of bees, as told by Seinfeld, is a bore with a capital B." [24] Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the film three stars out of four, saying "Bee Movie is not Shrek, and it is not Ratatouille either (by far the standout computer-animated feature of the year). But it has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids—and probably more than a few parents, too." [27] Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review, saying "This is a beautifully animated, cleverly executed, warm and funny adventure." [24]
Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars, saying "All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off. We learn at the outset of the movie that bees theoretically cannot fly. Unfortunately, in the movie, that applies only to the screenplay. It is really, really, really hard to care much about a platonic romantic relationship between Renee Zellweger and a bee, although if anyone could pull it off, she could." [28] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film three out of four stars, saying "The vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian. If I believed in a sitcom afterlife, I'd swear the whole thing was cooked up by Kramer and George's dad." [29]
Bee Movie led the 35th Annie Awards season with five nominations (including Best Animated Feature). [30] [31] At the 65th Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film. [32] The 13th Critics' Choice Awards nominated the film for Best Animated Feature. [33] [34]
Award | Date of ceremony | Category | Recipients | Result |
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Annie Awards | February 8, 2008 | Best Animated Feature | Bee Movie | Nominated |
Animation Production Artist | Michael Isaak | Nominated | ||
Storyboarding In A Feature Production | Nassos Vakalis | Nominated | ||
Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production | Patrick Warburton | Nominated | ||
Music in an Animated Feature Production | Rupert Gregson-Williams | Nominated | ||
Critics Choice Awards | January 7, 2008 | Best Animated Feature | Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith | Nominated |
Golden Globe Awards | January 13, 2008 | Best Animated Film | Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner | Nominated |
Golden Reel Award | 2008 | Golden Reel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR for Animated Feature Film | Will Files (supervising sound editor/sound designer); Michael Silvers (supervising sound editor); Randy Thom (sound designer); Luke Dunn Gielmuda (supervising Foley editor); J.J. George (supervising music editor); Scott Guitteau, Kyrsten Mate (sound editors); Steve Slanec (ADR editor), Kevin Crehan (music editor) | Nominated |
Producers Guild of America Awards | February 2, 2008 | Best Animated Motion Picture | Jerry Seinfeld, Christina Steinberg, and Cameron Stevning | Nominated |
Kids' Choice Awards | March 29, 2008 | Favorite Animated Movie | Bee Movie | Nominated |
Favorite Voice From an Animated Movie | Jerry Seinfield as Barry B. Benson | Nominated |
Two lawsuits involving Bee Movie were filed. Multiple Swedish animation students, who were represented by an American attorney, sued because their developed concept in 2000, titled Beebylon, had similarities to Bee Movie. A separate suit was brought by Florida-based cosmetics company Beeceuticals over the use of their trademarked phrase "Give Bees a Chance". Both of these lawsuits were rejected. [lower-alpha 1]
Years after the film's release, Bee Movie had an unexpected rise in popularity as an Internet meme. In 2015, posts of the entire film screenplay spread across Facebook. [44] [45] In November 2016, YouTube user "Avoid at All Costs" uploaded a video The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster where the entire film sped up every time the word "bee" was used. [46] [47] Its popularity spawned several variants where the film (or its trailer) were edited in unusual ways. [48] Vanity Fair later characterized the film's popularity as "totally bizarre", [49] and later identified Jason Richards as one of the meme's larger promoters through his @Seinfeld2000 Twitter account, citing the "off-brand Pixar quality", [49] while writer Barry Marder referred to the relationship between bees and humans. [50] Inverse felt the film's internet popularity being helpful to millennials that saw it. [51] Paris Martineau of New York magazine identified the meme started on Tumblr in c. 2011 at which point users posted the opening quotation identifying it as inspiring. By December 2012, however, these posts became so ubiquitous that it would inspire parodies. [52] It was suggested that the spread of videos such as The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster was inspired by the preceding popularity of the "We Are Number One" memes, many of which used a similar title format of "We Are Number One but..." [48] Seinfeld expressed no interest in making a sequel to Bee Movie despite its online popularity. [53]
Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.
Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several species of bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants or the secretions of other insects, like the honeydew of aphids. This refinement takes place both within individual bees, through regurgitation and enzymatic activity, and during storage in the hive, through water evaporation that concentrates the honey's sugars until it is thick and viscous.
Pollen is a powdery substance produced by most types of flowers of seed plants for the purpose of sexual reproduction. It consists of pollen grains, which produce male gametes. Pollen grains have a hard coat made of sporopollenin that protects the gametophytes during the process of their movement from the stamens to the pistil of flowering plants, or from the male cone to the female cone of gymnosperms. If pollen lands on a compatible pistil or female cone, it germinates, producing a pollen tube that transfers the sperm to the ovule containing the female gametophyte. Individual pollen grains are small enough to require magnification to see detail. The study of pollen is called palynology and is highly useful in paleoecology, paleontology, archaeology, and forensics. Pollen in plants is used for transferring haploid male genetic material from the anther of a single flower to the stigma of another in cross-pollination. In a case of self-pollination, this process takes place from the anther of a flower to the stigma of the same flower.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 American fantasy comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. It is loosely based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf. The film stars Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Joanna Cassidy, and the voices of Charles Fleischer and an uncredited Kathleen Turner. Combining live-action and animation, the film is set in an alternate history Hollywood in 1947, where humans and cartoon characters co-exist. Its plot follows Eddie Valiant, a private investigator with a grudge against toons, who must help exonerate Roger Rabbit, a toon framed for murder.
Jerome Allen Seinfeld is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer. From 1989 to 1998, he played a semi-fictionalized version of himself in the sitcom Seinfeld, which he created and wrote with Larry David. The show aired on NBC from 1989 until 1998, becoming one of the most acclaimed and popular sitcoms of all time. As a stand-up comedian, Seinfeld specializes in observational comedy. In 2004, Comedy Central named him the 12th-greatest stand-up comedian of all time.
A pollinator is an animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This helps to bring about fertilization of the ovules in the flower by the male gametes from the pollen grains.
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Vanessa Chantal Paradis is a French singer, model and actress. Paradis became a star at the age of 14 with the international success of her single "Joe le taxi" (1987). At age 18, she was awarded France's highest honours as both a singer and an actress with the Prix Romy Schneider and the César Award for Most Promising Actress for Jean-Claude Brisseau's Noce Blanche, as well as the Victoires de la Musique for Best Female Singer for her album Variations sur le même t'aime. Her most notable films also include Élisa (1995) alongside Gérard Depardieu, Witch Way Love (1997) opposite Jean Reno, Une chance sur deux (1998) co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, Girl on the Bridge (1999), Heartbreaker (2010), Café de Flore (2011) and Yoga Hosers (2016), directed by Kevin Smith. Her tribute to Jeanne Moreau at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival during which they sang in duet "Le Tourbillon" became notable in French popular culture. In 2022, she was nominated for the Molière Award for Best Actress for her performance in the play Maman.
Bee pollen, also known as bee bread and ambrosia, is a ball or pellet of field-gathered flower pollen packed by worker honeybees, and used as the primary food source for the hive. It consists of simple sugars, protein, minerals and vitamins, fatty acids, and a small percentage of other components. Bee pollen is stored in brood cells, mixed with saliva, and sealed with a drop of honey. Bee pollen is harvested as food for humans and marketed as having various, but yet unproven, health benefits.
Phil Tippett is an American film director and visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio.
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Bees can suffer serious effects from toxic chemicals in their environments. These include various synthetic chemicals, particularly insecticides, as well as a variety of naturally occurring chemicals from plants, such as ethanol resulting from the fermentation of organic materials. Bee intoxication can result from exposure to ethanol from fermented nectar, ripe fruits, and manmade and natural chemicals in the environment.
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A copypasta is a block of text copied and pasted to the Internet and social media. Copypasta containing controversial ideas or lengthy rants are often posted for humorous purposes, to provoke reactions from those unaware that the posted text is a meme.
Bee Movie Game is a video game based on the DreamWorks-animated movie Bee Movie. The game was released on October 30, 2007. Beenox developed the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and Microsoft Windows versions of the game, Smart Bomb Interactive developed the Wii version, and Vicarious Visions developed the Nintendo DS version. As Barry B. Benson, players take on an adventure to save the bees' production of honey through New York City. Players get to experience Barry's life within the hive and navigate their way around the world from the feature film using many techniques. Players can drive through the city using race cars, scooters, taxicabs, and trucks. Players can "fly" Barry at high speed through the sky. Using the Pollinator, players can Blast through obstacles or they can Buzz to cause a chain reaction. Players get to Stop Time by using Barry's bee reflexes. The video game features 2-person multiplayer mini games. Jerry Seinfeld, John Goodman, Patrick Warburton, and Tress MacNeille reprise their voices from the movie in this game.
"The Burns and the Bees" is the eighth episode of the twentieth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on December 7, 2008. In the episode, during a poker game, Mr. Burns wins ownership of the Austin Celtics basketball team and he decides to build a new stadium in Springfield that endangers a bee colony which Lisa built. Lisa's subplot refers to the current worldwide disappearance of bees.