A-Pollen-ly Personal 'Bee Movie' Doesn't Exactly Fly

NPR | By Bob Mondello

Published November 2, 2007 at 3:00 PM EDT

Producer-writer-star Jerry Seinfeld and his minions say Bee Movie isn't an ordinary, committee-made animated comedy. It's one man's vision, they say, and that makes it special.

And what is Seinfeld's vision? Well, it's a story about a funny guy (honeybee Barry B. Benson) who talks a lot about nothing. And who, though everything's going great, decides that he and his buddies should stop working. (The humans are stealing their honey, you see, so no more pollination.)

When they do stop, the whole world becomes dreary. Everyone's so sad. So after a while, our hero starts work again. Sure enough, things get brighter — flowers bloom, people laugh again.

Mr. Seinfeld's, you'd have to say, is a fairly personal vision. Personally, I think I liked "nothing" better.

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Bob Mondello

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.