The film, described as a “hit comedy” in its original 2008 back-of-the-DVD blurb, stars a bee, Barry B. (1) In 2007, on planet Earth, DreamWorks studios released an animated children’s film titled Bee Movie (tagline: “Born to Bee Wild”). Questions like: Did comedian Jerry Seinfeld - fresh off of a nine-year run of prodigious success in a sophisticated and beloved sitcom - really make an animated children’s movie about a bee falling in love with a human woman (voiced by Renée Zellweger)? Did this movie really somehow become the source of a seemingly endless parade of increasingly abstruse memes on Tumblr and other social-media platforms? Did 15 million people really watch a video titled “The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster”? Did Vanity Fair actually declare that “ Bee Movie Won 2016”? How the heck did we get here? Has it really been exactly ten years since the release of Bee Movie? At some point, every society must confront the existential questions that undergird its very existence.
