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Spoiler Points for Bee Movie (2007) [PG] 90 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $11.75
Film's Official Website • Film's Trailer
Click to read the non-spoiler review
Plot Spoiler:
•Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) has just graduated bee high school when he and his best bee friend, Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick) discover that the next step of their lives will be a permanent one. They will have to select their career for life and stick with it. This just doesn't jive with Barry, so, rather than following in the footsteps of his Honey Stirrer father, Martin (Barry Levinson), he goes out on a dangerous flight outside with the pollen jockeys. Outside for the first time in his life, he encounters any manner of dangerous places from a tennis court to the apartment of a young woman, Vanessa Bloome (Renée Zellweger) where he's nearly killed several times mostly by her boyfriend Ken (Patrick Warburton). When he breaks Bee Law and speaks up to thank her for saving his life, and after getting over the fact that bees can speak, the two become friends. [There's lots of innuendo about them being more than friends, etc.]
•On one of his visits to see Vanessa, they go to the grocery store and here he finds jars and pouches and plastic bears filled with honey. He cannot understand how the honey got here or what could have happened to bees that made it. He vows to get to the bottom of this honey mystery and follows a truck to the factory. Here he learns that bees are being kept in modified hives and smoked in order to allow the beekeepers to get at the honey without fear of stinging. This prompts Barr to step up and do the only thing he can think of, sue the humans to get the honey returned. While most people wouldn't think Barry's got a leg to stand on, his case gets stronger every day; and, eventually, the judge decides on behalf of the bees. The honey gets returned and all the bees are set free.
•Little does Barry realize though that when the honey is returned, the bees have to no reason to work or make honey. They can just sit and relax. Over time, though, their lack of pollination of the flowers causes all the world's flowers to die. This lack of flowers begins to hurt all flower-related businesses including Vanessa's flower shop which she has to close. She's very angry and annoyed with him. Barry is beside himself because he was trying to do the right thing.
• Barry follows Vanessa to the Rose Parade in Pasadena to see the last flowers on earth when they get the idea to steal a float and head back to Central Park where they can use the pollen to pollinate and, hopefully, bring all the world's flowers back from the point of extinction.
• There plan starts to work until they are on the plane back from California and face rain delays. So, Barry gets into the cockpit where the nervous pilots try to squash him. Eventually, they are both rendered unconscious by mishaps leaving Barry to fly the plane. He calls Vanessa to the cockpit over the loudspeaker. Air traffic controllers are very worried, but Barry connects with the bees of the world who all come to help fly the plane home by getting under the plane and providing lift and guidance. The plane lands at the airport on top of a pulsing target made of bees. The pollen is collected and distributed instantly restoring the balance of nature. Barry receives an official Pollen Jockey jacket and helmet. All is well in the world.
Scientific Issues:
• Hey, it's an animated film, it's supposed to be fun and for kids, who cares if there are scientific inaccuracies. Animals can't talk, but that hasn't stopped people from writing stories about animals and talking animals and animals that can talk to people for ages. Get over it! Well, no. Parts of the scientific inaccuracy or 'poetic license' can be excused, but part cannot. Suspend reality to make an animated film all you want. Maybe this film takes place in an alternate universe where bees are very different. But, if not, why not try to be as scientifically accurate as possible while still maintaining the humor, fun, and characters?
• Why do the animators have to anthropomorphize every animal to such extremes for animated films? Bees are insects, have compound eyes and absolutely all insects have 6 not 4 legs. It cannot be that complicated to program in the other two legs. Back in the day when it was so complicated, animators were known to reduce the numbers of fingers on a hand. Well, these bees have 5 fingers on hands that bees don't even have since they have no hands in the first place, but they are all short two legs. Does that make any sense? Bees don't have girlfriends or boyfriends. They have a Queen who lays all the eggs and is serviced by special male drones. There is no earthly reason that the animators could not have stuck to the basic elements of bee physiology or behavior and not maintained exactly the same story—with the possible exception of the disappointment of Barry's 'parents' when he does not follow in his father's footsteps as a bee stirrer. It's less bothersome that they made up all these jobs and the honey manufacturing etc. If you can stick true, however to the basics, it's far easier down the road for the subsequent science teachers to not have to spend years undoing the misperceptions kids 'learn' in such films. Either be so fantastical the bees are obviously not even bees anymore, or stick to some fundamentals.
• There is a lot of misinformation in the film, also, when it comes to flowers and pollination. First of all, pollen grains contain the sperm cells of plants. Because there are rare cases where sperm cells from one species of plant can fertilize eggs of another plant, the idea that flowers stolen from the Rose Parade will be able to provide pollen for all the flowering plants in Manhattan is pretty suspect and quite odd. The film, in general, treats pollen like some kind of magic fertilizer for plants that, without which, they will die, which is totally false. Some plants do require pollination for reproduction, but few require this as their exclusive method of reproduction. Most plants have other methods at their disposal including cloning—shush, don't tell all the anti-cloning people about this or they might try to outlaw it or something. The idea that all the flowers in the world would disappear if there were no bees out pollinating them is just plain wrong. Flowering is not a product of pollination. Flowers evolved on angiosperm plants as a way of attracting pollinators which include birds and many insects, not just bees. And, in fact, once pollination occurs, the flower parts that humans like (mostly the petals) fall of and a fruiting body with seeds forms (we like many of these too like apples, peaches, cherries, etc.). It makes entirely no sense to have made this entire pollination thing part of the film's plot and an important one at that.
The Moral Conundrum for Barry Benson and the Fraudulent Science Used to Make it Happen
Consider this: Barry sues the humans to stop them from stealing honey—actually a fairly legitimate concept. He wins, much to the surprise of everyone. And that could have been the end of the film. But then it would have been about 45 minutes long. So, apparently to extend the story, the writers took a bizarre wrong turn. They decided to turn Barry into an unintentional villain. Oh, the foolish bee. By suing the humans and getting the honey returned, he accomplished several things: (a) he gave the bees no more reason to live—apparently their only reason before was to collect nectar and make honey, and (b) once the bees stopped doing their jobs, all the flowers died because there was no pollination which leads to a world-wide problem of putting florist and parades out of business. The net result is that he's suddenly a 'goat'. How dare he be so selfish as to take away the reason for the bees' very existence? And how dare he then cause all the world's flowers to die? So, poor Barry learns a valuable lesson. It's better just to let people steal from your hard work than to potentially cause such calamities. Why would the writers want to teach this lesson? (Put it this way…imagine if after Erin Brockovich sued and won her case against the chemical industry that was polluting the ground water, she found that now that the water is better all the people who were making a living by cleaning the water were suddenly homeless and that the clean water caused all the plants in California to die since they'd gotten used to the contaminated water. See, she should have just shut up and left things well enough alone. So what if there were a few birth defects or cancers or whatever. How dare she do the right thing?) But the worst thing about this lesson, which is an odd lesson at best to be teaching children, in fact, some might go so far as to say this is actually a very bad lesson to teach them, is that it's based on completely fraudulent science. It would never happen. Barry wins the suit, all the honey is returned, and even if that meant the bees just sat around and relaxed, it would not cause all the flowers on earth to die. What an odd thing to do in a story. You reach a point where you need something more, more drama, more conflict, so you invent a scientific calamity that results in your hero becoming an accidental villain and having to steal in order to undo the damage he's done. Yes, don't forget that he and Vanessa steal a float from the Rose Parade and fly it to New York City.
Spoiler Concluding Thoughts
• Benefit of the doubt or not, rated PG or not, it would be very compelling to find out what the writers were thinking when they dreamed up this plot. What justifications did they use to (a) ignore basic bee physiology and behavior, (b) invent this flower pollination death problem, and (c) turn their hero into a villain and back again?
• While on the one hand it's all too easy to dismiss these issues and say, "Hey, it's a kids movie. Who cares? They're kids? It's supposed to by light and funny, and that's about it. Oh, an by the way, name an animated film that doesn't take poetic license with nature etc." But, on the other hand, why not stick to some basics? Why not, at least, give the bees six legs and compound eyes? They are no 'cuter' with 4 legs and mammal eyes. Bees don't have tongues and teeth either, and they communicate using a complex waggle dance. They may also be the only creatures we know of capable of detecting quantum fluctuations without instrumentation. They are incredible creatures who build complex hives with a complex behavioral hierarchy. No one is expecting the Dreamworks animators to make a bee documentary, but it's difficult to justify these decisions that create far more confusion than is necessary especially when the writers created the major plot conflict based on something that simply wouldn't happen.
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