Bee Movie

File:BeeMovie.jpg

Hold on to your honey.

Bee Movie is a 2007 CGI animated feature film written by and starring Jerry Seinfeld. Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a bee who has just graduated from college, is disillusioned at his lone career choice: making honey. On a special trip outside the hive, Barry is rescued by Vanessa Bloome (Renee Zellweger), a florist in New York City. As their relationship blossoms, Barry discovers that humans actually eat honey, and subsequently decides to sue us.

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Tropes used in Bee Movie include:

• Alliterative Name: Barry B. Benson.
• Artistic License: Biology
  • The aforementioned Insect Gender Bender, a bee stinging a man and surviving by replacing the stinger with a plastic sword, and the whole bit about pollination; the moment the bees stop pollinating, every plant dies despite the fact that pollination would only stop new flowers from being made, and plants would live as normal (especially obvious with the trees that would still live for years), and the pollen being reintroduced bringing them all back to life. Also, it is impossible to pollinate most flowers with pollen from other species.
    • Male mosquitoes don't drink blood (and females only drink it so they can get the protein to make eggs)
    • Male bees don't sting. The stinger is a modified ovipositor that only female worker bees have.
    • Just because the bees stop, there's still the hummingbirds/butterflies/etc to pollinate as well... I mean obviously it doesn't help but Bees don't have sole dibs on pollination. Heck many species don't even need animals at all, relying on the wind alone for pollination, and would be perfectly fine and ordinary.
    • The humans return a huge keg of honey to Barry's hive... but it's still one keg and that's still only one bee hive out of the countless amounts of honey already distributed in the world, and the countless number of bees living in countless amount of bee hives! This may have been simplified for the story to be clearer and these epic, but Barry's hive can't possibly be the sole producer of honey!
  • Sting (the singer) gets arrested for his stage name, since it's a bee-thing. Sorry, but the wasps, bumblebees, mud daubers, yellow jackets, stingrays, hornets, scorpions, platypuses and jellyfish would like to have a word.
    • Not to mention it has connotations outside of the animal kingdom.
• Artistic License: Law- MST3K Mantra as much as you like, but when the Defense presents their opening statements and case before the Plaintiff does (When the Plaintiff outlines what the matters in contention are), there's an obvious logical, let alone legal, problem.
• As Himself: At least three
  • "You know there's a Larry King in the Human world too!"
  • Other cases include Gordon M. "Sting" Sumner and Ray Liotta as animated versions of themselves.
• Courtroom Antic: While waiting for the Smoking Gun to arrive, Barry's friend stalls by teaching the jury how to make paper hats.
• Dateless Newspaper - Averted, which for a CGI film is pretty much unique.
• Did Not Do the Research - See You Fail Biology Forever.
• Evil Lawyer Joke - "Well, I was already a blood-sucking parasite! I just needed this briefcase!"
• Fantasy Twist: Barry's daydream about Vanessa and himself having a romantic picnic together ends abruptly as Vanessa pilots a yellow and black ultralight to fly with him, then crashes and burns when she tries to duplicate an aviation feat only bees can accomplish.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Too many to count, usually covered up by all the bee puns
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Aside from Seinfeld and Zellweger, there's Patrick Warburton as Ken, Matthew Broderick as Adam Flayman, John Goodman as Layton T. Montgomery, Chris Rock as a mosquito and Oprah Winfrey as the judge. And NPR's Carl Kassel As Himself.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters
  • Especially jarring with the two guys who seem to work at the honey plant just because they enjoy sadistically torturing bees. Yes, because people only work at honey plants because they want to torture bees.
    • It might just be those guys, to be honest, but those are the only two workers Barry sees, which might contribute to the whole thing.
  • Ken is the perfect example - he seeks to kill Barry out of jealousy of Barry's friendship with Vanessa, and also out of his own fear of bees.
• Incredibly Lame Pun - Thrown at the viewer mercilessly, starting with the title.
• Ink Suit Actor - Barry is just Jerry Seinfeld with wings and stripes.
  • Also, Ray Liotta and Sting both appear as themselves. The primary purpose of "Bee Larry King"'s one scene is lampshaded his similarity to the human version.
• Insect Gender Bender - Male bees don't have stingers in real life, and only female mosquitos suck blood. But the movie doesn't seem to care, so why should we?
• Interspecies Romance - Barry and Vanessa. Not to mention Barry's uncle and the cricket in San Antonio.
• Jerk Jock - Averted. Early in the movie there's a scene where it looks like the pollen jockeys are going to turn out to be like this, inviting Barry along on their next scheduled nectar run to mess with him, but when he actually shows up, they're perfectly happy to show him the ropes and are quite personable about the whole thing.
  • Played straight with Ken - he's a tennis player and is revealed to be a Crazy Jealous Guy.
• Large Ham:
  • Layton T. Montgomery. Even hammier after being stung.
  • Ken, naturally.
• Make the Dog Testify: The courts don't bother making sure the bees can speak before allowing them to sue humanity.
• Meaningful Name: A florist named Vanessa Bloome.
• Mouse World - Or, bug world, in this case. The bee hive is depicted as a miniature society, not unlike one we humans might have.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero - To quote Mr. Montgomery after Benson won the lawsuit, "This is an unholy perversion of the balance of nature, Benson! You'll regret this." Turns out that now that the bees were put out of the job due to the honey being "brought back" to them, the pollination halted and the plant life was slowly dying out, with the rest of the food chain about to follow soon.
• The Red Stapler - People actually looked for Ray Liotta Honey after the movie came out.
• Seinfeldian Conversation - It is Seinfeld as a bee.
• Serious Business: The montage where the honey is reclaimed. The ATHF holds a little old woman stirring honey into her tea at gunpoint.
• Shown Their Work: It's clear the company did a fair amount of research, then overruled it in favor of the Rule of Funny.
• Smoking Gun: Used literally. Barry shows up with a smoke gun used to calm down honeybees. Bees win the case against humans.
• Space Whale Aesop: The first acts seem to be preaching an aesop against human exploitation of animals, but then flips the message around in the ending act. It's okay to eat honey as long as it comes from sapient bees that give you permission.
• Villain Has a Point - Despite being presented as a villain, Montgomery was right in saying the bees would regret winning their case, seeing as not making honey would later cause the flowers to begin dying.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? - Deliberately. Barry has a swordfight with a shelf-stocker wielding a pushpin.