Minding his own beeswax

Jerry Seinfeld's "Bee Movie" might look like an animated children's romp, but dig deeper and it starts to resemble autobiography.

The film reflects its writer/producer/star both in surface details (his character, a bee named Barry, drives a car based on Seinfeld's 1959 Porsche Speedster), and in terms of his values. For all its laughs, the film is a celebration of the Zen of work, and Seinfeld is as focused and industrious as any hive-dwelling drone.

For the past four years, he has been toiling over every detail of "Bee Movie," from its conception to the barnstorming P.T. Barnum-style nationwide tour he has carried out to promote it. He's been the centerpiece of a media blitz that began last May with a high-wire stunt at the Cannes Film Festival.

"I jumped off an eighth-story hotel room on a cable that they hooked me up to, in a bee costume," he recalled during his stop in Minneapolis last month. "You can see it on YouTube. It was insane." In the past month alone, he has guest-starred on NBC's "30 Rock," appeared in a half-hour collection of "Bee Movie"-themed comedy shorts on his old home network and hosted preview screenings in a dozen cities.

Seinfeld's diligent nature is at odds with the nonchalant schlepper he played for nine years on his sitcom, and with many onlookers' expectations. Mention that he has an ambitious new film coming out and the typical refrain is, "Seinfeld? He doesn't have to work anymore!" It's a comment you never hear about Jim Carrey or Robin Williams.

True, with an annual income that Forbes pegs at $60 million, Seinfeld doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. What he wants to do is to work.

He has a track record of taking creative risks. After leaving television in 1998, he toured the country in live performances, retiring his old material and creating an entirely new act from scratch in small-time comedy clubs where the hecklers don't care how famous you are. The 2002 documentary "Comedian," which followed him through the process, detailed how he painstakingly analyzes and rewrites his material to create the appearance of glib spontaneity. As you might guess about a man with a renowned collection of sports cars, he dislikes coasting.

Ask him why and you get a surprisingly earnest response. "Nobody wants to just turn to mush, you know?" he said.

When money is no longer a factor, he explained, "you work because you think you have something to offer. I think that working actually keeps you alive.

"One of the little messages I put in the movie is the importance of work, because it's a big part of bee life. They work very hard their whole lives. Working hard and doing small jobs carefully makes a big difference in the world."

That was some offhand joke

So it is with his new film, which began as an offhand joke and grew to become DreamWorks' big fall release. It all began when Seinfeld quipped to Steven Spielberg that he'd like to make a movie about bees called "Bee Movie." Spielberg, whose DreamWorks studio had a solid success in the insect-comedy niche with "Antz," urged him to pursue the idea. "The title was all I had in the beginning and the movie was made to fit the title," Seinfeld said.

For 2½ years he and a team of writers from his sitcom worked on the script, producing 212 drafts. The project appealed to him as a way to work in films without stepping in front of cameras again. "I didn't have much interest in making a [live action] movie. Acting felt too similar to all those years of doing the show," he said. "The thing that really intrigued me was to work in a totally different kind of sandbox with different toys. It was just a whole different world, the challenge of trying to get my kind of humor in an animated format. It just motivated me."

Seinfeld's rapid-fire approach to storytelling made the project twice as ambitious as the run-of-the-mill animated film.

"A normal, average animated movie will have something like 20 speaking characters, 30 locations and 30 sequences," said "Bee Movie" co-director Simon J. Smith, a veteran of "Shrek" and "Antz."We had 75 speaking characters, 45 sequences and 65 locations. That was the main challenge."

New Yorker Seinfeld spent "three or four days a week" at DreamWorks' California studio through the lengthy filming process, Smith said, weighing in on creative decisions large and small.

"I acted out every line of every character in the movie. I performed it for the animators, day after day, in many cases," Seinfeld said. "Then they would take it and add their things to it. And then I would take that and add something to that. And so we kind of worked together that way. But I helped frame and animate every single action in the 1,400 different shots that make up the movie."

He also insisted on the unusual step of recording all the voice actors together so there could be interplay among the performers. When the cast includes stars such as Renée Zellweger as Barry's love interest, a human florist, and Chris Rock as a sassy mosquito, coordinating schedules can be almost impossible, but Seinfeld wouldn't have it any other way.

"I always feel like I can hear it when two people are recorded and they were never anywhere near each other. You don't hear the performances affecting each other," he said. "And also I wanted to perform with these people. Everyone in the movie is someone I've admired for a long time."

Welcomed input from king bee

Smith said he and co-director Steve Hickner welcomed Seinfeld's input. "By nature, making a CGI film, you have to have a detail-oriented mind. You have to build every cup, every spoon, every single thing. He would observe things that he wanted more detail in or change a prop and say it would be funnier if it was this. We'd sit there for a whole day clicking on costume designs in a crowd scene and saying, no, we don't want this look, we don't want that character."

The result was a meticulous evocation of New York's Central Park and Upper West Side, and a fanciful bee world called New Hive City. The hive interiors borrow elements from factories, taffy-pulling machines, refineries and aircraft carrier flight decks, with scores of details hidden away for viewers to discover when they freeze-frame through the eventual DVD. The bee newspapers feature stories such as, "Frisbee Hits Hive, Internet Down" and "Bee Goes Berserk, Stings 7 Then Self." And there are lots of lovingly rendered bee sports cars, with no gridlock.

"Bees drive extremely fast with fantastic coordination," said Seinfeld, smiling at the notion. "They don't need any traffic lights or traffic signals because it's a utopian society with perfect cooperation. So one of the things they've perfected is intersections. They just all drive into the intersection at the same time and never hit each other."

Seinfeld studied bee lore in depth to create his insect world. He can speak knowledgeably about the hexagonal design of a beehive honeycomb, "the most rigid geometric form," and the latest Cal Tech research into the aviation principles governing the mysteries of bee flight. "Their bodies' weight is too great for the surface area of the wings. It seems that bees flap their wings in a totally unique kind of scooping motion that no other bird or insect uses. They just really interest me."

Hitting the road to publicize his film at the end of the long production process, Seinfeld seems excited and energized, except for one tiresome detail. He's tired of people asking him if he made the $150 million movie for his 6-year-old daughter, Sascha, and two sons, Julian, 4, and Shepherd, 2.

"These things are too hard to do for your kids. If I want to do something for my kids, I take them out for ice cream."

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

Colin Covert • ccovert@startribune.com