The Bee Movie memes are all, on some level, expressions of disbelief. In a sense, this was a reaction not just to the movie itself but to the realization among millennials that they’d been shown a truly odd movie as children and thought nothing of it. Nielssen’s mashup of Bee Movie and “All Star” by Smash Mouth, a band that has also found newfound relevancy online, went viral in late 2016. “It’s so easy to apply your own joke inside the Bee Movie framework. The whole concept, there’s nothing like that,” says meme artist James Nielssen. “I just started making a lot of Bee Movie jokes because the movie is so absurdly funny. Is it a post-modern triumph or commercial blunder? The movie is hard to categorize, which is what endears it to its newest fans.

He then decides to sue them and it becomes a legal drama and, to some degree anyway, a film about reparations. As the two form a romantic connection - yes, that happens - Barry finds out humans exploit his kind to make and sell honey.

The film is about a honey bee saved by a New York City florist named Vanessa (Renee Zellweger). Perhaps because of its alienating cheerfulness or its apparent ignorance of its own peculiarity, the movie became a weird internet infatuation, receiving the sort of attention normally reserved for Lynchian masterpieces.īee Movie was always strange. Then there something unexpected happen: The internet exploded with a swarm of memes featuring lead bee Barry B. A mediocre movie rocking a 51 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes faded into obscurity on account of its own mediocrity.

And, for a decade, that was pretty much that. The Bee Movie was released in 2007 to middling reviews from critics who wanted arthropod Seinfeld and got a superficially banal kids movie instead.

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