Welcome, friends, to the Bee Movie thread.

I know what you're thinking in the brains. Why are you watching Bee Movie? Why are you doing this? You can't be doing it because you enjoy it, because this film does not produce happiness or satisfaction. Watching this is not a good decision. Instead, you should make another decision, one less bad.

To that I can only say: no, asshole. This film is a testament to something or other.



My honesty must stay above reproach, so I will make two opening statements:

1. I cannot remember this movie whatsoever, though I am pretty sure the entire thing was playing in my vicinity or something? I'm going in semi-cold.
2. You will learn a lot about bees here, or a lot about what bees are not and what they do not do. This is because I am going to sperg about it when it comes up, which is basically all the time.

This is what I know about this movie's production, history, and general background: Jerry Seinfeld apparently wrote a lot of these bee puns, according to someone in the animation megathread. This level of ignorance is, for me, unusual, because I am seriously batshit for animation and know far too much about many obscure animated films, including ones I hate. Bee Movie was fairly mainstream, so why did it pass under my radar? The answer is because I felt bad for everyone who was involved in this massive wad of shit garbage and thought that it was my responsibility as a kind person to keep at a minimum the number of humans who have seen this film. What made me change my tune? Existential embitterment.

Okay, okay. There's more to it than that. Bee Movie is remembered for being bizarre and yet unremarkable, widely-seen and yet unseen, artful and yet ugly. What is this mystery? What happened here that we don't understand?

Note: Having now achieved the halfway point of the film, I can assure you that this is the most fucking bewildering thing I have ever seen.

Chapter 1: barf farts



Backpfeifengesicht, "a face in need of a fist."

Look at this fucking bee! I've never wanted to punch a bee so fucking bad in my life and all he's doing is choosing sweaters. And they're all black and yellow... OR YELLOW AND BLACK, HAHA! That is the first joke in this film.

They use honey as hair product and mouthwash, and they eat it.

He has parents, apparently? I am not going to go deeply into this, because we all know some basic things about bees, but okay. They're establishing here that bees do not obey the biologically accurate "one queen as hive mother" structure. This is important because I am 100% sure this will be contradicted at some point or otherwise confused. Also, minor but important point, worker bees are all female and all sisters. Their brothers, the drones, do not work and exist only to mate and die. So as everyone knows, it's stupid that the main bee is a worker and male. But you know what? What were you fucking expecting? He, like the Bug's Life ants, also has four limbs. That's wrong. He has irises, that's wrong. He has fingers and not claws, that's wrong. He has these really teeth that are just one white band, like Disney princess teeth. That's wrong, too. But you knew this going in. This was on the poster. The movie was not called Accurate Bees. So basic bee shit you have to let go.

Anyway, he can use his antenna as a radio with his best friend or something. I bet they forget about this later when it would be important.

These bees eat doughnuts and, like, fruit or something? His parents' house is motherfucking huge, too, which I don't get. They make a point of how many bees there are, but they all have huge open houses for each family? How big is this hive? Apparently our main character took a "day" to roam the hive (when highschool/college/etc are "three days" apiece, so they're giving them what they think are bee-like lifespans. European honeybees, Apis mellifera, the social bee we're all familiar with, grows to adulthood in 21 days so this is not too far off.)

He meets his apparent best friend in a car (even though bees can fly, and he's shown flying in the house?) They're headed onto their college graduation. Oh, instead of "hair gel" it's "fuzz gel". Is that a joke? Bees have hairs. It's okay. You get to call them that. Hairs.

On the way there, our main bee whose name I am already forgetting cracks wise about an old friend dying when he stung a squirrel. Oh, also male bees don't have stingers. But again nobody cares so I don't either. I bet it's a plot point, but I'm more taken by the fact that our main bee here is such a flippant shit about one of his friends dying ("He was such a hothead"). You should see his eyebrows here. Those are the eyebrows of Stalin as he sets execution quotas for various districts of the USSR.

Now that these two have graduated, they need jobs. Bees work for "Honex", because company names end in "X". There's a joke about Spanish language, so apparently these bees truly are speaking English.




The background has an extremely pleasing design and color palette. Nothing else is good here.

Pollen "jocks" bring pollen in, unlike in reality where this is done by female bees alone. This does feel misogynistic to me, especially since these pollen "jocks" are so masculinized. More on this later.

There's a really weird joke here, where the friend bee says to main character bee, who I will call Blue because I can't remember his real name, that the girl behind him is hot. Blue says, "She's my cousin!" and the friend is all, "She is?" ... To which Blue responds, "Yes! We're all cousins!" This really makes no sense. In a real hive, all workers and drones are sisters (though due to haplodiploidy... ahh fuck it, they're all siblings, okay?) But these bees are shown to have non-queen parents. So for all the bees in that age class to be cousins, there'd have to be a one-child policy in this hive, China-style. At best your population would halve every year. But yeah, a joke vaguely about incest is more important than the movie making sense so let's go. (This would also mean his parents, his parents' parents, and his-- ahh shit you get the problem. Either bee cousins do it all the time, in which case it wouldn't be taboo, or the movie doesn't care and the movie doesn't care so okay.)

The graduated bees continue their factory tour. They learn that they can choose the job they take, but they have to work the job forever. In reality, bees take different tasks over the course of their lifespan. Also there are no vacations (something mentioned earlier. But if there's no such thing as a vacation, why remark upon it? Why is it a phenomenon they seem to understand?) Our bee Blue (oh and his friend is Adam) is happy that he only needs to make "one decision in life", but Blue doesn't like the idea, even though bee society is supposedly "perfect". Bee cars are fueled with honey, by the way.

We see the pollen jocks again. They're basically Top Gun style "fighter pilot" types. They're apparently the only bees who leave the hive, even though, again in Reality Land, female workers do this once they reach a certain age class. Whatever, these MACHO-ASS MANLY BEES go out to collect pollen like hoorah he-men of beedom. hunf grunt grunt fuckers



At least they remembered to have the pollen jocks collect nectar too.

Here's another thing that gets to me. Adam and Blue are watching the pollen jocks take ordered to a grizzled general bee. But if you choose one job and work it forever, does that mean he started as a general? He just got to be a general and now coincidentally he's old? We saw the dean bee earlier. Did he graduate and then--bip!--he's dean?

Lady bees are crushing on the pollen jocks, and then Adam and Blue crush on said ladies. "Aren't they our cousins too?" "Distant, distant." Oh so the movie realizes it's violating its own logic constantly. Maybe that's reassuring.

Blue is pretending to be a pollen jock to impress the ladies. The pollen jocks notice and come over, and to "mess with him" they pretend that Blue and Adam really are pollen jocks. They ask Blue to go with them on their next round outside the hive. He seems to be considering it. It then cuts and we see him looking out over his family's balcony (how does this fit in with the flat suburban area we saw earlier?) and the scenery really is lovely. His dad comes up to him and tells him the virtues of bee culture. You knew this scene would happen, and you know exactly how it progresses without me explaining it to you. There's always this scene in this kind of movie.

(His father is a stirrer, by the way.)

There's a vaguely racist joke about things he's saying he could do to disappoint his parents, including "shacking up with a grasshopper, [or] getting a gold tooth and callin' everybody 'dawg'". How would he ever have seen a grasshopper? They don't enter beehives. This is not Bug's Life; there's no species heterogeniety here. Also, is there a bee urban culture? If all bees have the same opportunity to choose the job they'll take, then how could you have this kind of broad social--ahh fuck it. I guess it just bugs me when jokes don't make sense in their own universe. Hah, bugs! (Bees are not bugs. They are Hymenoptera, not Hemiptera.)

Blue and Adam go to the job desk!



It's revealed that jobs open when the bees who were previously in those positions die. Okay, makes sense.


Some available jobs.

Adam is all up in this--he really wants to work this stupid joke job from earlier in the film (catching the last drop from the honey bottle)--but Blue seems panicky. Oh god, Blue's name is "Barry." Like Jerry, but with a.... BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB!

Blue--I'm still calling his Blue--runs off and goes to fly outside with the pollen jocks, like we knew he would. They're told to watch out because "bees can't fly in the rain." We're also told "Bee Law #1: No talking to humans!" It is a thing apparently they could do, but aren't supposed to. Why? Maybe we shall find out, or maybe the movie doesn't care. This really does add an element of surprise, when everything's so ill-defined that you don't sense directionality from the film.