Bee Movie: A Decade-Plus of Memes, Strange Appeal, and Jerry Seinfelds Unexpected Success on Netflix

When the world's largest streaming service, Netflix, posted a frame from Bee Movie with a quote from Cardi B's "Outside," it captured the attention of audiences beyond what would be expected. Bee Movie, a DreamWorks animated film that has been in the Top 10 on Netflix for a full decade, has a hold on certain audiences that is both more and less wholesome than other animated movies. This article explores the reasons behind this phenomenon, including the film's unique blend of Seinfeldian attitude and strangeness, as well as its meme-worthy qualities.

The Cheerfully Derivative World-Building:

Bee Movie opens with a cheerfully derivative world-building that almost feels like a parody. It introduces Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld), a prospective worker bee who starts to question the life of conformity mapped out for him as an insect. The film's plot is essentially the same as that of Antz, the first DreamWorks computer-animated movie, which itself compares unfavorably to the near-simultaneously released Pixar insect cartoon A Bug's Life. However, Bee Movie has a famous Jewish comedian with an adult following, Jerry Seinfeld, wisecracking his way through a kids' movie.

The Strangeness of Bee Movie:

While Antz uses Woody Allen mostly to voice a bunch of canned jokes swapping human concerns for ant stuff, there's some genuine Seinfeldian attitude in Bee Movie. It's also a strange cartoon. The Netflix tweet picks up on this strangeness: It's about a bee who falls in love with the human woman Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger), their flirtatiously made all the creepier by the fact that she's rendered in 2007 CG 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 and Third-Tier Disposability:

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. However, Bee Movie came out the same year as Shrek the Third and is 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 he brought some Seinfeld writers along with him and let them get really silly with the formulas.

The Gag of Barry on "Bee Larry King":

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. Barry then picks apart