Quentin Tarantino’s soft spot for the weirdest kids’ film of the 2000s: “It’s a good movie”
Movies that are ostensibly designed to appeal to children don’t necessarily have to be kids’ films, since the ones regarded as the best are always the ones that win over audiences of every generation. It’s also a genre Quentin Tarantino has a strange relationship with, in more ways than one.
Like most people with a pair of eyes and a heart, he’s a huge fan of the first three Toy Story flicks, but that’s where he draws the line. Even though the franchise has continued for another two instalments, Tarantino thought the third film was so good that he has no interest in seeing those characters again.
That’s fair enough, if a little pedantic, and the two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter is hardly the first person to be left traumatised by Bambi, either. It’s one of Disney’s most enduring, indelible, seminal, and beloved animations, but like so many before and after him, the death of the titular deer’s mother reduced the guy who wrote Pulp Fiction to a sobbing pile of emotional rubble.
Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon both made the filmmaker’s list for the best movies of 2010, so he’s not exactly snobbish when it comes to his personal preferences, seeing as all of the aforementioned animations hail from major studios, made a fortune at the box office, and are virtually the opposite of the obscure, B-tier fare that he’s equally fond of.
That said, it’s on-brand for Tarantino to admit he’s got a soft spot for what might well be the weirdest kids’ film of the 2000s, if not the entire 21st century. Why? Because much of 2007’s Bee Movie is predicated on the premise that an anthropomorphised insect, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld, wants to fuck a human woman, which isn’t usually the sort of narrative throughline you get in such fare.
In general, it’s a strange movie. It was co-writer and star Seinfeld’s first time playing the lead in a feature, a trick he wouldn’t repeat until 2024’s Unfrosted, and a semi-biographical comedy about the origins of Pop-Tarts was decidedly less bizarre than whatever the hell Bee Movie was supposed to be.
In the first act, there’s an incest joke, since it’s implied that all the bees are cousins, regardless of how “hot” one of them finds another, which becomes a recurring gag, naturally. Eventually, romance begins to blossom between woman and bee, complete with hand-holding and a tender montage, which includes Seinfeld’s Barry B. Benson using the word “lust” to describe his feelings.
It should be noted that Bee Movie isn’t strictly a story about a bee having unrequited sexual feelings for a human woman, but it’s heavily implied nonetheless, and a subplot about Barry planning to sue the entire human race for profiting off the honey industry, which only ups the weirdness, never mind the several seemingly random shots taken at Ray Liotta throughout the running time, for whatever reason.
We know that Tarantino has seen Bee Movie, and we know that Tarantino enjoyed Bee Movie, because when it was mentioned in his presence, he said, “It’s a good movie.” It’s not, but everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it makes some degree of sense that he’d have sufficiently enjoyed a so-called kids’ film that’s full of bizarre innuendos, although he might have been disappointed that the bees weren’t animated to have feet.
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