This lesson is satirically driven home in a courtroom plot that erupts just as the love story starts to get sticky. When Barry discovers that honey is sold in supermarkets, and that it is harvested from captive bees held in smoky, shoddy fake hives, he sues the human race, going after some of its notorious bee abusers. These include Ray Liotta, who sells his own brand of honey, and Sting, whose name is obviously offensive to bees. (Both celebrities make cameo voice appearances, as does Larry King, playing a character called Bee Larry King. It's funnier than it sounds. Or maybe it's exactly as funny as it sounds.)
Even when playing an animated bee, Seinfeld does not demonstrate great emotional range. His comfort zone as a performer ranges from peeved to perplexed to moderately psyched, with occasional bursts of obvious exaggeration to indicate that he is at least aware that more intense states of feeling exist. But his detachment works in the movie's favor by defusing its sentimental impulses.
Perhaps because of its star's background in stand-up comedy, Bee Movie makes overt a conceit that is usually left implicit in animal-kingdom cartoons, namely that species is the cartoon version of ethnicity. Barry and his tribe are not just bees. They identify as "Beeish" - I'm sure "Benson" was something else back in the old country - and worry about their children dating wasps. On his travels Barry meets a mosquito who speaks in the voice of Chris Rock and who refers to his despised and misunderstood brethren as "bloods."
These riffs on identity politics give Bee Movie an extra fillip of comic vitality in an otherwise soft and fuzzy entertainment.
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