movies: bee movie

Bzz bzzzz bzz bzzz bzzzzzz bzzz bzz Bee Movie bzzz bzz bzzzzzz.

Yeah, yeah, it's a cheap joke, but they use it in the movie, so whadyagunnado...

I have to say I wasn't expecting a whole hell of a lot from this movie... I mean I've never been a great fan of Jerry Seinfeld... and I know that the whole movie idea started out as a joke to Steven Spielberg about making a movie called "B Movie" about bees... then they had to go and make up what the movie was about.

And the answer to the question "what is this movie about?" is "not a lot". Or I should say "not a lot that's very overly original when it comes to an animated movie"... Insect main character feels out of place in his highly structured society (Antz), leaves his home and gets involved with a human being (Ratatouille), and in the end saves the day through the very nature of his insectness (A Bug's Life)...

But then there is that old line about there actually only being four original jokes in the world and every other joke is some kind of variation, however distant, of one of them.

And it's one of those plots where you don't want to examine it very closely or overly logically or you'll see that there are spots you could drive a truck through... partially from a whole "what real insects can and can't do versus the movie version"... but then you do have a bee that spend the whole movie wearing a sweater and sneakers, and talks... so maybe that whole logic idea doesn't need to be looked at too closely.

As always with whatever is the newest and the latest and the most whizbang CG animated movie, the animation and texture in this one are amazing... just little, kinda stupid details really... like the refraction seen through a drinking glass and spots of rust on an outdoor metal chair and the weave in human scale fabric when seen from the bee's point of view... it's little stuff, but it makes the whole thing seem more believable (I was going to say "real" but that's not accurate). The human characters are still a little stretchy or floppy or something, although the ones in this movie are better than the vast majority of the humans in, say, Shrek 3...

I could probably have done without the "celebrity cameos"... Ray Liotta, Sting and Larry King, the first two as themselves and King as the bee version of himself... I would imagine that it's hard enough to make a believable and lifelike human character, let alone a believable and lifelike human character who happens to look like somebody that people will recognise. And the whole Bee Larry King thing just seemed kind of like a cheap joke... although it was somewhat funny towards the end.

In the end it was, as you would kind of expect, one of those movies that you just classify as "fluff" and then move on with your life.

yani's rating: 2 stingers out of 5