"Bee Movie" Production Notes
FROM MAN TO MACHINE:
TAKING “BEE MOVIE” FROM THE PAGE TO THE COMPUTER
Another bit of classic wisdom — though more for war than for moviemaking —is that a successful campaign is headed by one general. The same could be said for an undertaking as complex as an animated film.
As Simon Smith sees it, “I don’t think there's ever been a major talent like Jerry Seinfeld who has been as involved with an animated movie as he has been. Every little detail of this movie has been influenced by Jerry and his sensibilities. And that creates that Seinfeld stamp, which I think is on the movie in every single frame.”
Adds Steinberg: “I think it's very interesting, because he is an incredibly collaborative person. And, at the same time, he is so exact in what he's looking for and what he wants. I think because Jerry sort of grew up on ‘Seinfeld’ as a writer working with his team, he is very comfortable with that process. And so, he began the ‘Bee Movie’ writing process with his group of writers, some of whom were on the show with him. And he would sort of give them the parameters of what he was looking for, and then they would come up with the jokes and the different story ideas.”
One of the ways DreamWorks Animation guaranteed a tight-knit collaborative process was to bring Seinfeld (the proud New Yorker) to the DreamWorks Glendale, California campus every day through the magic of Hewlett-Packard. The production crew and technology teams who worked on “Bee Movie” were spread out across the two DreamWorks Animation campuses. Separated by over 350 miles, HP's cutting edge telepresence solution, the Halo Collaboration Studio, brought the Glendale and Redwood City, California teams virtually into the same meeting room.
Additionally, more (the creator needs to be around to make his own film, right?) HP Halo enabled Seinfeld to provide daily creative direction to the Redwood City crew with the same fidelity and communication effectiveness as the Glendale crew sitting right next to him. When a Halo was installed in Seinfeld’s offices in mid-town Manhattan, the fledgling animation filmmaker was able to spend eight or nine hours a day with the DreamWorks team, solidifying his involvement every step of the way.
Producer Steinberg says, “We have grown to love Halo. And we use it literally eight or nine hours every day. We're with Jerry and the Halo system if he's not out here. We write on it. We watch the movie together and do editorial notes. We have development meetings. We have layout meetings. This movie would never have been made without that system.”
Smith explains, “What's been amazing is the videoconferencing between us and Jerry in New York inside editorial. We have a big screen where he has a camera on top looking at us and we can look at him. And he can see the footage for editing and editorial, and we just all work together. It is a seamless process. It never felt like he was in New York or wherever he was. He always felt present inside the movie. So, he's literally been with us every day for the last four years. And if that videoconferencing wasn't there, that would have meant a six-hour plane ride and a two-hour transfer time to get to talk to him and show him our work in the way we need to do. Without the HP umbilical, we'd never have been able to make the movie as we did. It would have taken three times as long and we’d all be dead.”
Seinfeld has his own unique take on the process: “Jeffrey decided that he wanted to spare no expense to facilitate my working with the crew in L.A. And so, he brought everyone those disposable cameras, by the cash register at the drugstore, and everyone would take pictures of things. And then they would develop them and they would mail them to me. Every three weeks, I would open the envelope and I would look through the snapshots of what they were doing. And then I would take pictures and send them back and, well, that didn’t work too well, actually. So, we had to go to HP and use a million-dollar Halo videoconference system instead. They can talk to me and then I talk back to them. It’s almost like a telephone, except much more expensive. It’s all the conveniences of the telephone, but without the stigma of low cost.
“Actually,” he adds, “on this system, you're literally acting and behaving and speaking, and you're picking up a lot of communication that is non-verbal — you’re able to see someone’s face and their posture. So the exchange of ideas is much more efficient than with a phone.”
DRAW ME A PICTURE
Co-recording sessions and heavy reliance on the HP Halo system weren’t the only departures from traditional animation production that “Bee Movie” utilized. Seinfeld’s clean slate with animation brought with it new perspectives. It was decided that traditional storyboards lacked the detail the filmmaker wanted to see. So the team looked to, as Hickner puts, “The Cintiqs — a digital tablet where we could draw right into the computer and change things faster. It was essential, as our storyboards became far more animated than we would have utilized perhaps a few years before. We could put more color in and they were more developed. And that actually helped, not only for Jerry, but for the rest of the crew. It helped us all visualize better.”
Head of Story Dave Pimentel says, “Every moment was scrutinized by Jerry. He would look at the Cintiqs and come up with other options, other camera angles, better ideas that he may not have thought of when the sequence was written. And when he saw it built, there was more of a foundation for him to stand on — then, he was able to break the world open further, which was an amazing process, especially considering he was new to animation.”
Smith adds that, “Using Cintiqs is much quicker and provides a cleaner-looking image. And so, it gave us a nice foundation for the movie when we didn’t have any real animation or any real lighting shots or anything like that. As opposed to drawing paper photocopied or shot, it's just clean, and you can do other things with these images: you can quickly do backgrounds; you can change character positions; you can change things very quickly with the digital image, as opposed to having to re-draw it and re-shoot it.”
While “Bee Movie” is clearly a voyage into a fantastical place — although it could be possible that some people in the audience may have actually spoken to a bee (and, more importantly, gotten a response) — nearly everyone has at least a passing familiarity with bees and big cities. So the filmmakers had to base some of their fantasy on reality — and that’s where research paid off.
Multiple fieldtrips to Central Park generated countless ideas and such things as the inclusion of Turtle Pond in Vanessa’s backstory (she lost her toe ring there) and the placement of Barry’s hive in the Sheep Meadow. Many lucky crew members also visited apiaries to observe, firsthand, the secrets of bees and the honey-making process (which helped inform the sequence in which Barry goes undercover in such an apiary). One of the foremost bee experts in the country visited with the production, and explained such facets of the bee world as the waggle dance (a bee booty-dance to communicate the distance to the hive and the location of the nearest flowers).
Seinfeld himself visited a beekeeper — a unique fellow who eschewed the use of the customary bee costume (the suit with hat and mask). The visit started promisingly enough, but when the keeper sought to show the interested filmmaker the queen bee, the angry rank-and-file bees rallied, with one determined gal (only female bees sting) chasing Seinfeld and eventually stinging him on the nose.
Seinfeld recalls, “After the sting, the guy says, ‘If it makes you feel any better, the bee probably died doing that.’ Great. Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better.”
Production interns also took hundreds of photos of real-life storms for reference in creating the film’s storm sequences. The art department took several research trips to apiaries and gardens such as Pasadena’s Huntington Gardens and to New York.
DESIGN FOR LIVING — A TALE OF TWO CITIES
During the earlier stages of initial design, it was clear that the massive amounts of different elements in the film would necessitate having a keen, organizing eye to oversee it all. The majority of the action in “Bee Movie” is set in two large and disparate worlds: the hive, a full city that includes the large Honex factory, home and all the amenities of a thriving metropolis; and New York City, complete with Central Park, Vanessa’s apartment, shops, city sidewalks, everything. Alex McDowell, a production designer with a sweeping list of credits that include films as varied as “Minority Report,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Corpse Bride,” signed on to the job.
Steinberg comments, “We really brought him in when we were trying to figure out how to create these different worlds. We needed the hive to be unique and specific. And we needed to juxtapose it with the world of the humans, as well as create a Central Park with a heightened sense of reality.”
Even though a majority of his credits are in live-action filmmaking, production designer McDowell found the animation process not all that alien. “There's very little difference, actually. At the beginning and in pre-production, the design process in animation is almost identical to live-action. It's just that, at some point, instead of building physical sets, you start building virtual sets. And obviously, the physical production schedule and the length of time is very different. But in terms of my approach to the aesthetic, I used exactly the same approach as I would have in live-action.
“And in many ways,” continues McDowell, “the reason I came into animation was that I had done a lot of films like ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ that had a large digital component — one-third of ‘Charlie’ is essentially an animated movie. It's highly stylized and fantastical. So, I was really interested in the level of control that you would have in a digital world.”
By the time of McDowell’s hiring, much of the design work had already been accomplished, but the various elements hadn’t been necessarily woven together. The material, as great as it was, needed a global design vision to pull it all together, particularly in the bee world. McDowell turned his attention to the architecture, imposing an organic, natural aesthetic to achieve a unifying, visual language — one that would translate across all of the worlds that needed to be created.
McDowell recalls, “Jerry had this great notion when we first met — something that he had been pushing from the beginning — which was that the bee society is really an idealized society; it's Utopian compared to the human world. The bees are a perfectly functioning organism within this perfect society. So, how were we to get that across? I started off with trying to centralize that idea around what they do, which is making honey. We set up the factory as the engine of the bee world, so that everything in the hive revolved around the factory and the honey-making process.”
McDowell and the artists placed Honex as the central foundation of New Hive City — it is literally in the center of town, with the rest of the city built on top of the factory. The script called for both urban and suburban areas within the hive, which posed a bit of a challenge: suburbia is usually associated with sprawling, wide-open horizontal spaces, something a hive cannot offer. The solution was to construct suburbia within the hive walls, vertically, with every residence boasting an inside balcony that overlooks the city.
The film’s design of New York City owes something to the beautifully stylized illustrations of early skyscrapers, which are these massive stone edifices that would not only dwarf a bee, but would be completely alien to a bee society.
McDowell brought with him not only a keen eye but also tools from the live-action world that would prove useful to animation artists. Pre-vis (short for “pre-visualization) is commonly utilized in live-action pre-production — it’s a virtual production space where all design elements, be they physical or virtual, exist in the same place, essentially a wholly animated environment. Camera movements and characters are incorporated into the virtual sets from the start, giving the filmmakers an early view of the film as a cohesive whole.
McDowell had suggested that, given the limited time (he was brought onboard approximately eight weeks before the first set needed to be in production), pre-vis would prove to be a valuable tool. To accomplish this tall order, they designed directly in 3D, telescoping much of the process.
“I’m comfortable with this process from live-action,” says McDowell, “and it became the beginning of a really fluid process — where we executed rough models and design in visual development, put rough cameras in, and got the sets approved by Jerry, Simon and Steve. Those models — which were already pretty sophisticated at that point — were moved into rough layout. Some of the models were sent to modeling, and we also involved modelers in the design development.”
The upshot was that pre-production came to resemble actual production, with many of the production artists and story coming in much earlier to the process. “We were all working in a virtual environment in pre-production in visual development, rather than what has been a more traditional animation mode of working in paintings that get translated when they move into production,” says McDowell.
All of which proved beneficial to creating the two, distinct worlds of “Bee Movie.”
Simon Smith recounts, “Alex really was the one who brought together the talent and solved the challenge of what the bee world was going to be. The motif to the human world became sharp, straight lines, glass and steel, rectangular — that was to be our visual language. The bee world — well, they’re round and chubby and cute and striped. And their world reflects that; it’s roundish. Once we had that delineation, it was easier to work. Cutting between the two worlds, you cannot mistake one for the other. Because he created such a strong contrast, it became easy to differentiate. I think that for us, we were really looking to make a movie that was a great balance to the sophistication of Jerry's humor.”
Honex and the surrounding bee world were partially inspired by the mid-century funkiness of the TWA terminal at New York’s JFK Airport, replete with organic, roundish shapes and a kind of 1950s modernism. As bees love to make honey, the overall factory environment reflects that, in a fun way. Nothing very high-tech — more candy-ish, like taffy pullers, centrifuges and bubble makers. Plus, inside the hive, everything is constructed of wax and honey — no other substances.
Perhaps the biggest moment in which we see the contrast of these two worlds —the warm, soft glow of New Hive City, the modern angularity of New York City — is when Barry leaves the hive for the first time, flying with the über-macho “pollen jocks.” Steinberg elaborates, “We really wanted there to be a contrast when Barry flies outside of the hive for the first time and sees the human world and Central Park with really saturated colors for the flowers, the sky and the grass. Our idea was that we would have bright, happy, friendly colors that are a great balance for the sophistication of the humor and the dialogue. So from the hive —vibrant but constrained color palette — to the lush, highly saturated colors of Central Park, to a separate palette of mostly monochromatic ‘human’ colors, which liven up when Barry begins to feel more at home in their world.”
As McDowell observes, “What most people forget is that Central Park is a rolling landscape, so it was great for us to physicalize that rush of Barry’s first flight out into a rollercoaster ride, an adventure with lots of things going on — the scale of park and city, kites flying, fountains, and all of the amazing flowers and colors. All of that make his first experience outside the hive an exciting one.”
Hickner was overjoyed with the final sequence: “It’s jaw-dropping. The whole painting crew, the layout crew and the visual development guys, surfacing, they just got it all. That moment is a pivotal point in the whole movie. Here's a guy who has lived in this enclosed, dome-like structure his whole life, where there's no vanishing point and no long horizon. So the moment where he goes out, we had to get the sense of euphoria. And I think the whole artistic crew on the picture got that moment wonderfully. It’s a Technicolor explosion. And knowing we were going for that, we kind of reverse engineered it — we actually pulled back in the hive, resulting in a pastel, compressed color palette in New Hive City.”
Approaching “Bee Movie” with his live-action sensibilities, Seinfeld also brought with him a sense of scope, perhaps a bit more expansive than the typical animated film. For him, telling the story was as important as the places in which it was told, and that made for a variety of locations within the two worlds. New Hive City would come to consist of (among other things): city streets, suburbia, Barry's apartment, Honex laboratories, the Honex lobby, and J Gate (the “pollen jocks’” take-off point). New York would consist of Central Park, Vanessa’s apartment, her flower shop, the rooftop, city streets and sidewalks, stores and boutiques, the interior/exterior of the courtroom, the interior/exterior of a 747 jet — all in all, approximately 41 locations (as many as 50, if you count sets seen only very briefly), which is about 50% more than many films. Steinberg smiles: “Everyone said it couldn't be done, but it was done. And I think one of the visual treats in this movie is that you really feel like you're moving — you really are with Barry on this journey across the country.”
SO, THIS BEE FLIES INTO A FLORIST’S WINDOW…
Detailed and finely wrought environments are fantastic in an animated film, but this story is about characters. While those digital cities were being built, the same amount of effort (if not more) was being focused on creating the bees and humans at the center of “Bee Movie.”
But which comes first, the bee or the hive? Observes Steinberg: “For us, it was really important that we find a world that worked with the Barry we had created, because he is not a realistic-looking bee. He is very stylized, and he’s got such a specific look. So we needed to find a way to join his look with the rest of the world and with the human characters. Alex McDowell and Christophe Lautrette, our art director, were just invaluable with that. And it was Christophe who really helped us bridge the gap between the humans and Barry.”
The French-trained animation artist and art director brought a versatility to his position, having worked on character, background and other types of animation. For him, some of the key to the look of “Bee Movie” lay with a colorful and cheerful spectrum. (After all, it is a comedy about a bee getting lost in the human world). Transparency of color was also key, as the materials in these worlds (from wax to steel and glass) featured varying degrees of opacity.
As Lautrette explains it, “At the beginning of production, the bee world was a bit more humanistic, with the bees looking more like humans, and the shape of the colors of their city more like a real city. We felt there was not enough contrast. So we went back to the actual shape of the bee — round, chubby, fuzzy.
“For Barry,” he continues, “we went in several different directions for his look and we also went on a path where he would look more like Jerry. We showed it to him, he wasn't too pleased about that. He said, ‘I want something really different. I want to be surprised by the character. I want to see more like a friend than myself, actually.’ That was really a challenge.”
But the Head of Character Animation, Fabio Lignini (who oversaw the 40-50 animators working on a character and ensured that, despite the different hands at the digital drawing board, the character remained the same), was up for the task. Brought aboard early, Lignini and his team helped “to develop the rigs, to see if the characters are doing what they should in terms of motion and controls. We worked with the modeling department and the rigging department to fine-tune the look of the characters, and this was before the production started. So we stayed with the production for a long time.”
Characters are first designed by a designer, an artist who works in drawings and paintings. Then the characters are modeled in a 3D, computer-generated environment. At that point, they remain an empty shell, just a sculpture. The character TDs come in and add all the controls that enable the models to have movement — body movement and facial movement.
Simon Smith explains that “It took a long time to get Barry's character looking exactly like Barry. As we were doing the story reel of the movie and making the movie in sort of basic drawings, his character was evolving. And at the same time, we were doing drawings of the character, of how we wanted him to appear in the movie, and they weren't quite matching up. So, it took us a while, and it was sort of a joint decision from everybody. Jerry had this idea of how they should feel and what they should do in the hive. But we couldn't put our finger on it.”
In the end, it was the clothes that made the bee. “The design of the character was determined a lot by the clothing for Barry,” says Smith. “We were struggling a little bit, because we were trying to find the right formula to make him feel familiar to us while lending itself to Jerry’s comedy, but we also didn’t want him to look too insect-y and unpleasant.”
What they basically wound up with was a design schematic: no shoulders (takes away the humanoid appearance) with little arms; a pleasant face on a chubby bee shape (basically two circles, body and head); antennae on the head; human clothes from about mid-thorax up, and fuzzy bottom from mid-thorax down; funny shoes (in Barry’s case, sneakers — a nod to Seinfeld’s affinity for them).
Smith sums it up, “It's actually sort of a formula: bee antenna, nice head, then human clothing, then bee bum, then insect legs and then sneakers. And that seemed to work really well.”
Lignini adds, “The sneakers are black and yellow, so they're very appropriate. And Barry’s sweater with the stripes is actually one of the things that make him look a little bit more like a bee with the black stripes. And very important: the polo neck, because in the early designs he had a skinny neck, which looked very human. So no neck gives him more of a bee look, with the collar just below his chin. Also, huge eyes are important.”
“Bees are very fashion-conscious,” says Seinfeld, “except they can't veer from black and yellow. That's it. They don't wear any other colors. But within that, they're very stylish. In the early character designs, Barry looked a little like me in a sweater, which wasn’t quite right, so he became, well, rounder and kind of sillier-looking. That worked for me.” (All in all, it took between 800 and 900 designs for the real Barry to emerge.)
Designing Vanessa was equally as challenging, but in a different way. She’s a realistic human character, which is tricky to execute in CG. The development of her character’s look took the longest. Her somewhat circuitous design path sent her back and forth between animation, rigging and modeling for tweaks and adjustments and fine-tuning, until the animators got her look to satisfy the filmmakers — somewhere in the realistic universe, but not so jarring that it takes you out of the movie.
While Vanessa owes her overall look to her character qualities — her spunky nature and colorful occupation brought a gypsy to some animators’ minds — Ken is more a result of his physical attributes. He is a vain alpha male, a regular gym-goer, who is unafraid to get in touch with his anger. The result was an over-the-top physique and a big mouth.
The disparity in size between the two lead characters — Barry is .825 inches tall, and Vanessa is somewhere in the low five-foot range — could have been a trouble spot for the animators. As if the filmmakers’ goals weren’t lofty enough, the decision was made not to utilize composite shots (shooting each character separately and then putting them together). All the characters would be shot in camera, as if the camera was filming them both. That would limit camera placement and inhibit their facility to capture both a bee and a human together in the same frame. (When director Simon Smith told Steven Spielberg that no compositing was used, the filmmaker was quite impressed.)
As Visual Effects Supervisor, Doug Cooper headed a team of about 100 artisans and was in charge of delivering all of the imagery for the film with a focus on lighting and special effects. Ultimately it was Cooper’s responsibility to partner with the directors, production designer and art director to ensure that the creative vision for the film reached the screen.
Cooper offers, “Part of the responsibility of lighting is to set the emotional tone and mood for the scene. We also used color and light to focus the audience where they needed to be looking, to help them identify the character that's important to the scene. We set the emotional tone for the scene with the use of color and directing the audience’s eye. We help highlight what's important and we help diminish what's not important, what's going to be distracting from the scene instead. It's really setting the mood and tone of every scene in the film and helping to set the underlying emotional themes with the use of color and light.” (Without their work, the viewer’s eye would wander over a screen filled with gray, plastic looking shapes and textures.)
For Cooper, “Bee Movie” breaks new ground for DreamWorks: “I think ‘Bee Movie’ has found a very nice balance between realistic lighting and materials. But it really draws a lot on illustrative looks and qualities. It's not a photorealistic movie —we’re not trying to be exactly like ‘Shrek’ or any other movie that DreamWorks has done before. We found our own place in the spectrum of style for the film.
“We're making a space that's really deep and has a lot of dimension to it,” continues Cooper. “The forms are very stylized, but unique to the bee world. We also came up with a whole architecture that is very specific to the bee world, and carried that stylization even out into Central Park, in the human world. For example, the trees in Central Park are like cotton candy forms with simple graphic shapes, but we grew each tree into that shape naturally, so it has all of the branches and leaves that a real tree would have, but molded into the stylistic shape.”
Cooper and his team also had to create an effect that would give the impression of bees’ wings flapping (the little fellows flap between 180 and 225 times per second). The studio had first encountered “the wing problem” with the character of the Fairy Godmother in “Shrek 2,” which consumed marathon work sessions to accurately render. Going into “Bee Movie,” a different approach was needed, since it entailed not one character, but hundreds of thousands of bees. The effects department began early development of a “wing blur” system that was more efficient than the previous method and more stylized (to fit the more illustrative style of this film). The team was inspired by dry brush techniques used in classical 2D animation. They produced a system that allowed them to provide flapping wings for nearly one millions bees in the jet landing scene, while also retaining many of the subtleties of wings, such as the way they glisten when they reflect light.
Another problem: as Cooper saw it, “We were working on ‘Bee Movie,’ so we had to get the honey right, right?” For this task, the animators took a cue from their approach to the wax that comprises much of the bees’ architecture, but had to expand their tool set to obtain the right texture, lighting patterns and viscosity. HP to the rescue again. HP's ProLiant DL145 servers, BL465c server blades and xw9300 workstations (powered by AMD Multi-Core Opteron processors with AMD64 technology) enabled the DreamWorks Animation artists to break through the 32-bit barrier and bring audiences an experience with an unparalleled scope and scale. The double precision-speed and large memory support enabled by the AMD64 met the challenges of, for example, handling the difference in scale between a hair on Barry B. Benson's head and a New York City skyscraper and running simulations consisting of more than 60 million particles.
Says Doug Cooper: “‘Bee Movie’ has been a huge challenge in many ways, and technically, it's been very difficult for us. The scope and scale of the environments, the number of trees and leaves and the amounts of data that we've had to push through to get the film completed have been enormous. The AMD Technology has helped us to get through that. It's actually made it possible to do things we would have never been able to do before. Aerial vistas of Central Park, huge views of New York City and rendering a swarm of literally hundreds of thousands of bees carrying a 747 in to land — things I couldn’t have imagined doing with the technology we had before.”
MAKING THE CUT / MAKING IT SING
Another key filmmaker who joined the production team of Seinfeld, Smith, Hickner and Steinberg at the beginning, and remained throughout the entire production process, was editor Nick Fletcher, who, during his tenure at DreamWorks and before, had worked on some of the most imaginative animated motion pictures produced. Christina Steinberg explains, “Nick has been a real asset on this movie. And he is a pro. He really gets Jerry's humor. He has been an integral part of our creative process because our Halo system is in his office and we invade it every day. So, I think we more or less forced him to become a very close part of our team. He got involved with the story notes and writing and he really came to know this movie inside and out.”
When he first read the script, Fletcher was struck by its freshness, due in part to what he felt was Seinfeld’s status as a newcomer to animation filmmaking. “What I really liked was that Jerry provided one vision but he was also intensely collaborative,” says Fletcher. “He’s been the inspiration behind the film from day one.”
The editor’s duties on the film begin at the very beginning, and he remains on the project through completion. They start with nothing, and sometimes begin by recording scratch dialogue from the script and executing story board sketches — to obtain a rough idea of the story. These are refined until a template for production is created — this acts as a safeguard against animators creating images that won’t be used, which would be a waste of time and manpower. In a marked difference from live-action production, the editor is involved in a pre-edit, to help determine the exact length of the shots, which saves time during production.
Once scratch tracks are laid, they are combined with the storyboard panels and the scenes begin to take shape. When everyone is happy with the storyboarded sequence, it moves into production, with the first stop being layout. Approved layout shots then move on to animation — by that point, the shots are much closer to being “movie ready.”
Even after these shots have moved into the pipeline of production, the story can still be re-molded — re-written, fixed, gags added, gags removed and new discoveries made. So there’s a constant revision process, which keeps Fletcher and his team busy for the entire length of production.
Others present at one of the last stops on the pipeline of production are the movie’s composer, Rupert Gregson-Williams, and executive producer of music, Hans Zimmer; Gregson-Williams’ melodies have been heard in projects as diverse as “Over the Hedge” and “Hotel Rwanda.” As with much of the look of the film, along with the sound design, Gregson-Williams’ music had to mirror the simplicity of the story and honor its wry and distinctive sense of humor.
In what can only be described as a perfect union between musical and filmic content, a cover of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” accompanies Barry and the “pollen jocks” as they zoom over Central Park and re-pollinate the flowers for the film’s finale.
THINKING BEE
If one had to provide an overall message for “Bee Movie” (other than the clever brainchild of one of the writers: “Black and Yellow — Hello!”) it would have to be “Thinking Bee.” While it could be taken as a cautionary reminder to stay in line and put the interests of the group before the interests of the self, it has actually come to signify something much more heartfelt and globally appealing.
“I actually think that there are several messages,” says producer Steinberg. “Something that is very important for Jerry — and something he wanted to get across — is the idea that every job you do, if done well, matters, and that everybody has value. The whole concept of “thinking bee” is working together and doing your job well. That matters — and it can pave the way for changes for the better. Jerry often equates how we all work here at DreamWorks with the way a hive works — everybody’s working hard and functioning very well together to produce something that, hopefully, a lot of people will like.”
Hickner adds, “‘Thinking bee’ is the mantra of the bees. It has been in the script from the start, and was important, because one of the things that Adam says to Barry is that he has to start thinking bee, because Barry is questioning whether or not he wants to work in the honey field, doing one job for the rest of his life. And during the course of the movie, Barry actually learns how important thinking bee and being a bee really is.”
“It has been incredible to begin ‘Thinking Bee,’” Smith comments. “I'll tell you what was really amazing is that we started making the movie, and about six months in we started feeling guilty eating honey, because we learned how much it costs the bees to make it. They work really, really hard. And then you start thinking about it as you go into the supermarket, and later, when you put a little honey out for tea. And then you don’t have it. That’s pretty odd. Your behavior starts changing. You start seeing stripes everywhere. You start seeing hexagons everywhere. It’s very, very strange.”
Creating “Bee Movie” from the ground up proved to be a learning experience for Jerry Seinfeld — and not just about the intricacies of producing, scripting and performing in an animated feature. He ended up taking an invaluable life lesson from the black and yellow guys, he says. “One of the things that you have to know about in the movie is that we talk about the fact that all bees, once they sting, that’s it for them. You sting, your life is over. So it’s a big step. You really have to control your temper. You don’t to just sting somebody because you get upset. You have to control yourself. Makes you really think about anger management, doesn’t it?”
In conclusion, Seinfeld observes: “For me, this has been a four-year process. It's just now hitting me that this is a wonderful gift to children — and I have kids — and I honestly never thought about that aspect of it along the way. I initially thought that this is a very interesting medium in which to work. It's so different and creative and unique —that was what attracted me to it. I wasn't thinking about kids at all, but now that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking I'm about to wrap up a present for kids with a big bow, kids all over the world, and that's what I'm excited about now.”
2007 Film Entertainment Magazine / EMOL.org. All rights reserved.
Bee Movie
