Bee Movie

October 29th, 2007
by Ide Cyan

Bee Movie!

In the tradition of Antz, A Bug’s Life and Barnyard, here’s another animated film aimed at children in which the leads are male characters portrayed as animals that should be female!

Bull’s udders and male ants and bees who get to be heroes instead of just mating and dying!

Woo-hoo! Patriarchal anthropomorphism: coming soon to a theatre near you!

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Filed under TV & Film, gender in marketing | Comments (11)

11 Responses to “Bee Movie”

  1. Susan Hated Literature » Week 247 on October 30, 2007 5:52 am

    [...] I so agree with this post, so I’m I crazy that the first thought that popped into my head when I saw the trailer for [...]

  2. Yonmei on October 30, 2007 12:44 pm

    That’s just so… stupid?

    The first time I encountered this was in a fantasy novel about ants written as a feudal society, with a Queen at the top of it – but virtually every other speaking role in it male. Even as a 10-year-old, while I enjoyed the story, it annoyed/puzzled me that the writer had made all the characters male, when an ant’s nest, as I knew, is pretty much exclusively female.

    It looks like the plot of “Bee Movie” – silly as it is – could as easily have been made with female-voiced bees as male. (Or, I suppose, for a twist, had the male bee discover that his entire life will consist of trying to have sex and then dying, and deciding he’s going to Do Something Big by returning all the honey in the world to the bees – which attempt ends in failure, and he realises that, as a male, his role is to have sex, then die.)

  3. Ide Cyan on October 30, 2007 10:36 pm

    I think it just goes to show that gender has fuck-all to do with biology.

  4. Sara no H. on October 31, 2007 2:30 am

    I’m more turned off by the fact that some of the trailers for this movie contain blatantly anti-gay material … especially the one where Matthew Broderick is talking to the other guy about all the “questionable” content in the script, which surprise surprise, is mostly homosocial/readably queer content. Ugh.

  5. Celluloid Sally’s » 2007 » October » 31 on October 31, 2007 2:19 pm

    [...] Feminist SF – The Blog! » Blog Archive » Bee Movie Even when the movies are about animals, the men get the (biologically inaccurate) better roles… [...]

  6. Yonmei on November 11, 2007 5:41 am

    Via Pandagon, an article in the New York Times by a beekeeper:

    In Hollywood’s version, there are more than three times the number of male roles than female ones, but a cartoon of my own hive would have thousands of leading ladies and only a handful of male extras.

    The nurses that tend the young and the workers that forage for pollen; the guards that keep predators like skunks away and the undertaker bees that unceremoniously haul out the dead: they’re all female. And whereas the movie’s protagonist is repeatedly told he must choose just one job and stick with it, my honeybees rotate through all of the available duties.

    “Bee Movie” makes only passing mention of the queen. But she’s the life of the hive, too busy producing perhaps a million eggs during her two-to-three-year existence even to feed herself (she has attendants for that). Were my Russian queen drawn for the big screen (think Natasha from “Rocky & Bullwinkle”), she would make quick work of the macho pollen jocks in “Bee Movie.”

    That’s because non-animated drones don’t collect pollen, or make beeswax, or even have stingers. If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off. Worse: when winter comes, worker bees shove the freeloading males out into the cold. If drones are required in the spring, the queen will simply make more of them.

    More in Pandagon: Amanda Marcotte notes that all the Pixar movies fail the Dykes To Watch Out For test miserably except for The Incredibles. Even though half the intended audience for children’s movies is female—and far from having an adult life that does seem at times to center around men—they’re not going to see female characters to relate to onscreen the vast majority of the time. I am reacting to this both as feminist and as sf fan – I want the science to be accurate – really think about what a beehive is like – and dammit, I do not see why bees should be regendered just because the director couldn’t cope with a film in which all the main characters were female.

  7. Ide Cyan on November 11, 2007 10:08 am

    Thanks for linking to that article. (LQ forwarded me the link on Friday.)

    It’s also worth noting that the male mosquito character in Bee Movie, who goes into a misogynist rant about female mosquitos in some of the commercials I’ve seen, drinks blood. Which is something only female mosquitos actually do.

    But it’s not so much regendering as re-sexing to *fit* patriarchal ideas about gender. The nature of fantasy fiction complicates the interaction of the concepts. First of all, the human concept of gender has to be put forward as relevent in relation to bees. In telling stories about them, writers will tangle with it, starting at grammatical gender. But these bees are fictional characters (rather than the topic of a documentary); moreover, they’re computer-animated characters. The writers don’t have to regender a set of fictional biologically female bees within the story to make working appear masculine, because they didn’t begin with fictional biologically female bees, or with a concept of gender invented by bees. Nor do they have to give sexual reassignment surgery to real bees to let them continue being workers under an overriding, human patriarchal paradigm: they can simply invent male bees that act regardless of the biological realities of drones. The means of fantasy allows the social construct — gender — to modify the physical reference point — sex — purely through the filmmakers’ wishes, and to establish it as the norm for the story.

  8. Laura Q on November 13, 2007 11:41 am

    Here’s another great article by one of the best NYT science writers — Natalie Angier. (She really ought to have an FSFwiki page! as a woman in science who has now commented on this movie. < g > I really have a huge intellectual crush on her – she’s an amazing writer.) I had a musing comment on the connections between these uses of biology and others, posted at yonmei’s man-made aliens post.

    Best quote from the article, and it sums up so much of what we’ve been saying:

    But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too?

  9. Ide Cyan on November 14, 2007 12:48 pm

    I <3 Natalie Angier’s reporting. Thanks for the link!

  10. Ide Cyan on May 18, 2008 12:57 pm

    Isabella Rossellini tells it like it is! Green Porno: Bee!

  11. laura queue on May 19, 2008 12:20 am

    omg, those videos were weird! some, hilarious. some, quite disturbing. i loved the spider one. (my partner is a biologist – she was tickled, as my grandmother would say)

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