The promotional assault for Paramount/DreamWorks’ Bee Movie has kicked into full gear, with a lot of the cardboard character stand-ins and other parallel market work I glimpsed almost a year ago while wandering around its production offices waiting for an off-the-record chat with someone I can’t currently remember (big impressions must’ve been made there, on both ends) now seeing fruition.
 wants more out of life than the inevitable career that<br />
awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City — that is to say, a job at<br />
Honex making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the<br />
hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry<br />
inadvertently meets a quirky florist named Vanessa (voiced by <a href=)
Renée Zellweger),
he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom — he talks to her. A
friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the
ways of the human race. At press time, however, it was yet to be determined if Barry stings Vanessa, causing her squinty eyes to wholly disappear into her face.
The ubiquitous marketing will make this movie a commercial player, no doubt, and the perspective/in-flight animation (seen in its trailer here) seems pretty cool. Still, there’s a lack of Shrek-style bodily function humor, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing for you or I, that tells me (along with the end bit, in which Barry flies repeatedly into a window) that the movie might have some difficulty carving out mondo repeat kiddie viewership. The question, then, is whether long-parched Seinfeld fans will want to get their fix of the comedian in animated fashion.