MOVIE REVIEW
Jerry’s and folks’ 2007, magnum opus, Bee Movie, offers poignant commentary on the film industry, the honey industry, the artificial boundaries we put up between ourselves and those around us, as well as the true meaning of friendship, romance, and following your dreams. The fact that so few people recognize this gem for the masterpiece that it is, and for its contribution to the arts is truly a national embarrassment. Barry Benson is a young bee faced with an impossible decision. He has to pick his job in the hive and he will work the job every day until he dies. He simply cannot fathom making such a limiting choice, especially when there is a whole unexplored world out there beyond the hive. Barry’s struggle resonates with any recent high school and college graduate, who has to decide what steps to take next. This decision will affect the rest of their lives, but with so many unexplored options, it feels impossible to only pick one. Before locking himself into one occupation for the rest of his life, Barry ventures outside into the human world with elite Pollen Jocks. In the real world, he encounters obstacles he’s never had to face before, including rain, delicious flowers, and seemingly malicious tennis players with bee allergies. This later behemoth of a character named Ken, has become an unlikely hero for many formerly uncritical phonetics of the film. While many initially supported the romantic articles in the movie, in which Barry reveals to a human woman that he can talk and she consequently leaves her husband, the same Ken, for the bee, it seems that their views changed on the second or third re-watching. They now put Ken, on the pedestal of rationality. If an insect were to come and steal my girlfriend, they argue, this would be the most normal way for me to act. Barry’s blossoming friendship with Ken’s girlfriend Vanessa begins when she rescues him from Ken’s panic press. Barry returns to thank her and accidentally lets slip that not only can he talk, but he also harbors and acute appreciation for classical music. The match truly seems to be made in heaven when it is first revealed that Vanessa works in a flower shop, and bees, as we know love flowers. But the partnership is tragically cut short when Barry accompanies Vanessa on a shopping trip and discovers the crime against old bees that is the mass sale of honey to humans. In an especially cruel twist of fate, some of the honey is even packaged in a bear shaped bottle, with no sensitivity to the bear’s routine terrorization of the bee community.
Barry launches a long overdue investigation, following a delivery truck through an onslaught of traffic until he discovers a bee farm. Adding to the horror of bees being caged away from their natural hives, Barry discovers that the bee farmers are gassing them while they still the honey they have worked so hard to produce. Outraged by what he has witnessed, Barry launches a legal tirade against the honey industry, speaking on behalf of all bees with his best friend as his legal co-counsel in court. Arguments are heard from a particularly insidious lawyer who tries to paint all bees as violent, and Barry’s partner stalls for time by teaching jury members some delightful origami tricks. Unsurprisingly, Barry wins the lawsuit and all of the honey that was previously available for human consumption is returned to its rightful owners, the bees. If only this would solve all of Barry’s, problems, along with those of the humans and the bees. As it turns out, winning the battle for justice has only made matters worse for absolutely everyone on the entire planet. Let’s start with the bees. Previously made to work constantly in one beloved position until death in the honey production industry of the hive, bees now have no life purpose, no reason to get up in the morning. They have all the honey they will ever need, so there is no point in working to make more. Meanwhile, Barry discovers that pollination is actually crucial for all of nature to strive. When the bees don’t work, all the flowers die and with them, eventually, also food available to humans, and later as a humans themselves. Vanessa’s beloved flower business shuts down, and she hurries to make it to the last Flower Festival on Earth. Barry realizes the folly of his mission and works to restore the world to the way it was before, full of flowers and hardworking bees. I hope I have helped shed light on one of cinema’s greatest works, and that you have been thoroughly enlightened by these revelations. Good work in the test.