Jerry Seinfeld has addressed the unspoken sexual tension in his 2007 animated film Bee Movie, admitting that the film “is really not appropriate for children.”
Seinfeld co-wrote, co-produced, and voiced the lead role in the 2007 DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures production. The film achieved moderate box office success, though in the years since has become a cultural obsession apropos of the relationship between Seinfeld’s anthropomorphic bee character Barry B. Benson and human character Vanessa Bloome (voiced by Renée Zellweger).
The relationship between Barry B. Benson and Vanessa Bloome is innocuous (there’s no interspecies lovemaking), though there is an implied, ambiguous longing shared between the two (Bloome’s human boyfriend grows jealous of Barry.) During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Jerry Seinfeld admitted that the intimacy between the two leads was unintentional.
“I apologize for what seems to be a certain uncomfortable subtle sexual aspect of The Bee Movie, which really was not intentional,” Seinfeld said. “But after it came out, I realized, ‘This is really not appropriate for children.’ Because the bee seems to have a thing for the girl. We don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.”
In a 10 year retrospective with New Statesmen, Bee Movie writer Spike Feresten explained how the accidental sexual subtext of the film came to be.
“Often we would lose sight of those characters in the room,” Feresten explained. They would just be Barry and Vanessa, and we would write this dialogue for Barry and Vanessa, and read it over and have to remind ourselves, well, this is a tiny bee saying this, and the tiny bee is fighting with her boyfriend, so let’s dial it back to friend, and make it less romantic, because it’s getting weird.”
In other news, Netflix has come under fire after the streaming service uploaded Seinfeld with an exclusive 16:9 aspect. The 4K upgrade of the beloved “show about nothing” has incited furor in fans, with some complaining that the modern aspect has meddled with some of the show’s most iconic gags.
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