It was just a corporate tweet, the kind of thing about which you could normally think (or re-post) “not now, Netflix” and move on. But when the world’s biggest streamer posted a frame from Bee Movie, currently residing in their Top 10 movies, with a weirdly thirsty text accompaniment quoting lyrics from the Cardi B song “Outside,” it has a way of snagging attention beyond all reason. That’s how Bee Movie has been operating for a full decade at this point. (Check out when it was added to Know Your Meme’s index.)
Of course, animated movies from DreamWorks, as well as Illumination, hang out in the Netflix charts all the time. Netflix rarely if ever has the Disney animated classics on hand anymore, and DreamWorks has a huge library of millennial and Gen Z faves from the past 25 years. (There are more computer-animated DreamWorks cartoons than there are Pixar movies.) But there’s something both more and less wholesome about the hold that Bee Movie has on certain unnamed audiences.
It might be exacerbated by the fact that Bee Movie opens with such cheerfully derivative world-building that it almost feels like a parody. It introduces Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld), a prospective worker bee (he’s just finished his ten days or so of lifelong schooling, covering grade school, high school, college, and a gap day he spent traveling around the hive) who starts to question the life of conformity mapped out for him as an insect. In other words, it’s basically the plot of Antz, the first DreamWorks computer-animated movie, which itself compares unfavorably to the near-simultaneously released Pixar insect cartoon A Bug’s Life. It even has a famous Jewish comedian with an adult following wisecracking his way through a kids’ movie; Woody Allen in Antz gives way to Seinfeld in Bee.
But while Antz uses Allen mostly to voice a bunch of canned jokes swapping human concerns for ant stuff (“middle child in a family of five million,” etc.), there’s some genuine Seinfeldian attitude in Bee Movie. It’s also – and this is crucial – a strange cartoon. The Netflix tweet picks up on that strangeness: It’s about a bee who essentially falls in love with the human woman Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger), their flirtatiously with each other made all the creepier by the fact that she’s rendered in very 2007 CG (they hadn’t quite nailed it yet) and voiced with a kind of dazed if charming stiffness by Zellweger. Stranger still, the movie swerves again when Barry finds out humans have been stealing bee-made honey and becomes incensed, eventually mounting a legal case against the humans (which involves Ray Liotta taking the witness stand in defense of “Ray Liotta Private Select” brand honey).
The memes characterize Bee Movie as sort of the ultimate in misguided, no-one-asked-for-this DreamWorks boilerplate, without the half-ironic affection afforded to childhood faves like Shrek. Its third-tier disposability is their fuel. But I’ll tell ya: Bee Movie came out the same year as Shrek the Third, and it’s a hell of a lot funnier than that one, and a lot of other DreamWorks cartoons.
The reason for this is Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld isn’t a born movie star, nor is he particularly well-suited to voice the lead character in a DreamWorks cartoon. But to make his not-exactly-obligatory foray into this field, he brought some Seinfeld writers along with him and let them get really silly with the formulas. In one deconstructing gag, Barry appears on the TV show of “Bee Larry King” to promote his cause, with the real Larry King voicing the bee counterpart, as is often the case with gimmicky celebrity cameos in alternate cartoon worlds. Barry then picks apart the laziness of the gag, discussing the laundry list of bizarre parallels between the bee and human versions of King. When bees win their suit against humans, there’s a montage of honey being forcibly confiscated, including from a little old lady at tea time. A bee who survives a stinging attack on a human describes the feeling as a kind of adrenaline-fueled ecstasy.
Why is any of this happening? It’s hard to say. But if Seinfeld’s Netflix movie Unfrosted seemed entirely of a piece with his personal interest in weird bits of pop-culture Americana and specifically breakfast cereal, Bee Movie is the one that actually gets more laughs, in the manner of an oddball late-period Seinfeld episode. When he’s not collaborating with Larry David, Seinfeld seems to veer toward Kramer territory; it’s Kramer who would, in all possible realities, be more likely to fall for a women many times his size. For that matter, Bee Movie sounds like a movie Kramer might pitch. That also explains why the movie dries up as it belatedly decides it needs Barry to learn a lesson; that goes against a famous Seinfeld maxim. Seinfeld the star could only flout so much animated-movie convention; maybe that’s part of why he’s barely made any movies since. But Bee Movie, in its resilient weirdness and the memes it’s inspired, may turn out to be his biggest post-Seinfeld project ever.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.