Revolutionar-bee: An Analysis of Bee Movie in Building a Postcolonial Society
Hello! For context, this was a final essay I completed for a class. To be completely honest I’m also way too exhausted to complete original cover art for this piece, so enjoy this promotional art I found on Google.
Bee Movie, by nearly all accounts, is incredibly underwhelming. It opened in November 2007 to mixed reviews, and while it was able to gross $293 million against its $150 million budget, this was by no means remarkable for a studio as prolific as DreamWorks Animation. The film itself was just as unassuming, if not confusing; its dry premise, concocted by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, consists of protagonist bee Barry B. Benson dissatisfied with his role in society and going on an adventure to change it, and its execution was muddled with shifting character motivations and nonsensical plot developments. Bee Movie’s legacy was also undoubtedly shaped by its mediocre predecessors, Shark Tale and Over the Hedge, two earlier DreamWorks films that followed an extremely similar formula that itself was extremely similar to that of smash-hit Shrek. Against two average films and looming in the shadow of a more culturally significant comparable, Bee Movie has fallen out of the public consciousness, save for a brief resurgence as a meme from 2016 to 2017.
When examining the film more deeply, however, Bee Movie tells a different tale. Bee Movie’s plot elements set up exponentially intensifying stakes that extend beyond the sphere of one bee; where its contemporaries focus on an isolated character or group of characters, Bee Movie’s core premise calls into question the relationship between humankind and beekind — or, more broadly, the relationship between two fundamentally different communities — through the lens of Benson. Of course, many of these elements are undercut by the sanitized nature of animated family movies and Seinfeld’s comedic stylings, but neither can detract from Bee Movie’s underlying theme of radical change. The film illustrates a revolution that culminates in its thesis for a postcolonial society: that it must be defined by the terms of the oppressed class while also accounting for ecological reality.
The world of Bee Movie largely focuses on the relationship between human society and a society of anthropomorphic bees. Of particular interest is bee society, which centers entirely around honey production and individual beehives; as such, beehives are also home to isolated cities not unlike the concept of the factory town. However, bee society does not commodify honey; it is understood as a multi-purpose essential, shown in the film to be used as food, gasoline, and hair product among other functions, and thus is never attributed to any monetary value. The production of honey is instead heavily implied to be a collectivist effort towards bee survival. The caveat of this system is that the workload towards producing honey inhibits bees from leisure because they are constantly working towards their survival, as exemplified by a worker at a honey factory: “bees, as a species, haven’t had one day off in 27 million years” (Bee Movie). There is also little room for social or professional mobility; the position of Pollen Jock, or the only role that allows bees to venture outside the hive to collect nectar, is notably barred off to bees outside of a certain physique. The ableism of the barrier is even circumvented when Benson, who is depicted as the epitome of non-Jock material, pretends to be a Jock and still fulfills his core duties. Up to this point, Bee Movie communicates two messages: first, bee society is similarly complex and developed as that of humans. Second, it introduces the flaws of the beehive from Benson’s perspective, namely no work-life balance and limited professional and thus social flexibility. Notably, these issues are shown to only impact him so far.
However, as Bee Movie increases the stakes of Benson’s societal problems to that of all bees, it also intensifies the need for radical change. After he ventures outside the hive and befriends Vanessa, a human florist, he is introduced to genocide against bees after spotting bottles of honey in a grocery store. The initial argument between the two depicts Benson’s charged outrage and Vanessa’s relative apathy: he shouts, “This is stealing! A lot of stealing! You’ve taken our homes, schools, hospitals! This is all we have, and it’s on sale?!” and as he explains the complex processes and labor in making honey, she remarks, “It’s just honey, Barry” (Bee Movie). Though well-intentioned, Vanessa demonstrates her ignorance of both her position as part of the colonizer class and the atrocities committed against bees. Her unemotional undermining of honey production indicates that human society views the colonization of bees as justified because their society is comparatively underdeveloped, a thought likely sustained by oversimplified ideas of the bees’ main export.
Benson later witnesses atrocities committed by beekeepers; as they gas bees in honey farm hives with a smoke gun, one of them remarks, “They make the honey, and we make the money” (Bee Movie). The honey farm hives, which are depicted as cramped studio apartments compared to the lush urban landscapes of hives like Benson’s, emphasize how little sensitivity Bee Movie’s humans show the bees or their indigenous cultures; human society, the film suggests, will accommodate bees only to the extent that their existence will maximize capital. The relationship between bees and humans parallels the colonization of Africans by white settlers as written by Franz Fanon in “Black Skin, White Masks”; to him, the white man perceives “difficulties in the development of [a Black person’s] bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity” (Fanon 110). Though the plight of fictitious bees is obviously not comparable to real world atrocities, the imperialist themes align with Fanon’s discussion of white settlers undermining the consciousness of African people and the complexity of their society to justify their colonization. And as the oppressed do not interact with the world as the oppressing class does, alluding to a supposed difficulty in “bodily schema,” their bodies are only fit for labor exploitation to an end that upholds the dominant system. Even Fanon’s realization of the institutionalized power held by white people, summed up as he writes, “when I had to meet the white man’s eyes…an unfamiliar weight burdened me” (Fanon, 110), aligns with one of the fundamental rules of the beehive being that no bee should ever talk with a human. Both subtly indicate a fear towards their oppressors ingrained both personally and societally; this hierarchy is the very bedrock upon which both bee society and the real world are founded, and thus, both must be challenged.
Bee Movie’s second act, in which Benson successfully sues the human race, argues that meaningful progress cannot happen within the framework of the existing system. The court case is fairly straightforward: Benson argues that all honey rightfully belongs to bees, the judge orders that all honey be returned to bees, bees experience excess for the first time in 27 million years, and the ensuing bee-wide stagnation and lack of pollination results in the death of most of the world’s flowers. Contrived plot points aside, the film slows down in one of its most intimate scenes between Benson and his best friend and newly hired honey-worker, Adam, as he reluctantly packs up his cubicle. Adam laments the lack of honey production due to the new surplus and indirectly regrets the court case, remarking, “So what if humans liked our honey? Who wouldn’t? It’s the greatest thing in the world!” (Bee Movie). Adam represents an apathetic middle class; he lacks the capital (or even species) to be considered part of the ruling class, but he prioritizes the role of honey over the liberation of the worker bees. Interestingly, though, Bee Movie uses his fixation on honey to undermine its importance. Though it was formerly established that honey production is primarily rooted in survival, Adam’s regrets in the wake of a honey surplus indicate a greater commitment to his position as determined by a capitalist view of honey rather than universal bee welfare. Additionally, the death of flowers around the world alludes to the bees’ collective removal from their ecosystem, both in their self-alienation and disdain from humans still upset over the court battle. As Timothy Morton writes in The Ecological Thought, this coexistence is fundamental to supporting an ecosystem (Morton, 2). Here, the legal decision determined by the ruling class — returning all the honey to the bees — fails to address the pervasive class inequities that first created this conflict. Morton acknowledges this in writing of modern economic structures that have limited the mind’s focus: “Any thinking that avoids ‘totality’ is part of the problem” (Morton, 4). For Bee Movie, this comes in focusing only on honey rather than the role of bees in society, suggesting that the solution requires thinking outside the economic framework of the ruling system.
The film’s resolution posits that the bees must define their role and society as a whole on their own terms: as a responsibility towards the ecology of the world. With Vanessa’s help, Benson locates the last patch of flowers and leads a mass re-pollenation effort to reinvigorate the world’s vegetation. He exclaims that the bee’s duty is to pollinate and make honey, pointing to the barren environment to highlight their duty to the world, in a speech to his brethren (Bee Movie). While honey is once again depicted as a tool for survival, there is a key difference: the bees explicitly define its and their species’ purpose as cornerstones to the ecosystem, understanding that interspecies coexistence of which they are a part is their responsibility. In positioning the bees as the leaders of their destiny and an evolving understanding of ecology, Bee Movie argues that the future of this postcolonial society must be determined by the oppressed class. This argument aligns with the work of Walter Benjamin, who writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” “Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge” (Benjamin, 251). It’s not just human society that gets reformed, however. Both Benson’s induction into the Pollen Jocks and the implementation of a more relaxed but still fulfilling honey manufacturing cycle represent changes that affect all of beekind. Through its conclusion, Bee Movie demonstrates that a postcolonial society can only be constructed by the oppressed class with ecological consideration.
Bee Movie constructs better futures for the microcosm of the beehive and the overarching relationship amongst humans, bees, and the ecosystem, all by detailing a revolution through the initial recognition of a systemic conflict, ineffective liberal solutions, and ultimately radical and ecological reorientation at the hands of the once-oppressed class. While it is certainly unlikely that DreamWorks sought a revolutionary narrative in a family-friendly animation, it is also rare to find films that enact changes beyond the scope of its protagonist, let alone an entire species; Benson’s journey, in connecting his personal problems to overarching systemic ones, is truly unique in this regard. Bee Movie’s animation and pop culture references may have aged poorly and its dizzying storyline often confuses even adult viewers, but beneath its strangely enticing mess is an introductory blueprint for social change. Amongst its copious bee puns, Bee Movie charts a journey for the liberation of all people — and, bees.
Works Cited
Bee Movie. DreamWorks Animation, 2007.
Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zorn. Essay. In Illuminations, 251. London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2015.
Fanon, Frantz. Essay. In Black Skin, White Masks, 110. London: Penguin Classics, 2021.
Morton, Timothy. Essay. In The Ecological Thought, 2–4. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
