Birds and bees, yes. Humans and bees? Definite not. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld wants you to know that he did not intend to promote human-bee “relations” in the 2007 computer-animated film “Bee Movie,” which he co-wrote, produced and gave voiced to the lovestruck bug.
Seinfeld appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” to promote the release of his iconic show “Seinfeld” on Netflix, and during the conversation, he mentioned that in the midst of doing stand-up tours and getting married and having kids and doing a series that changed television, he “made a movie with a bee.”
That movie, “Bee Movie,” has created a whole lot of buzz over the years, with millennials immortalizing it as a bizarre piece of their childhood as they tried to comprehend the strange crush a bee has on a human florist.
“I apologize for what seems to be a certain uncomfortable subtle sexual aspect of the ‘Bee Movie, which was really was not intentional, but after it came out, I realized this is really not appropriate for children,” he said. “Because the bee seemed to have a thing for the girl, and we don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.”
The “are they or aren’t they?” relationship between Seinfeld’s Barry B. Benson and Renee Zellweger’s Vanessa Bloome has turned what was part of DreamWorks Animation’s critical slump in the mid-2000s into an eternal meme, with videos like, “The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster” gaining millions of hits.
In a 2017 interview with The New Statesmen about the film’s 10th anniversary, “Bee Movie” co-writer Spike Feresten backed up what Seinfeld said, recalling that he and his fellow writers would forget about the species divide between their film’s protagonists, as they developed their dialogue.
“They would just be Barry and Vanessa, and we would write this dialogue for Barry and Vanessa, and read it over and have to remind ourselves, ‘Well, this is a tiny bee saying this, and the tiny bee is fighting with her boyfriend.’ So let’s dial it back to ‘friend,’ and make it less romantic, because it’s getting weird.”