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Bee Movie is a 2007 CGI animated feature film directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner, produced by DreamWorks Animation and co-written by and starring Jerry Seinfeld.

Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a bee who has just graduated from college, is disillusioned at his lone career choice: making honey. On a special trip outside the hive, Barry is rescued by Vanessa Bloome (Renée Zellweger), a human florist in New York City. As their relationship blossoms, Barry discovers that humans take honey from bee hives without asking, thus stealing it. He then sues humanity for its perceived transgressions against bees, and many things happen.

Ya like tropes?:

• Acoustic License: There are numerous cases when you have to wonder how is it possible that everyone can hear a tiny bee crystal clear, no matter the distance. It gets especially egregious during Barry's speeches in the courtroom, where he doesn't use a microphone or anything like that, and yet everyone can perfectly hear him.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In the trial scene, Barry makes a pun about Ray Liotta being a "bad fella." Oddly enough, he also directly congratulates Liotta on winning an Emmy for a guest spot on ER in 2005. Liotta is holding and displaying said Emmy as he's on the stand.
  • Jerry Seinfeld's character Barry B. Benson alludes to his first major acting role in a bit part on Benson.
  • Patrick Warburton plays the lead female's boyfriend in a work starring Jerry Seinfeld. This applies to both here as Ken and Seinfeld as David Puddy in the last few seasons.
  • Renée Zellweger would voice the love interest for a yellow animal (who has a strong resemblance to the celebrity voicing him) as she did in Shark Tale.
• Against the Grain: After graduating, Barry realises he's doomed to a life of non-stop labor and questions the role he's been born into. When he decides he doesn't want to work for the hive, his parents grow concerned and question his motives, especially after he reveals he's befriended a human. The trope is somewhat subverted, as the other bees adapt Barry's ethics and stop producing honey, resulting in catastrophic effects on the environment. Barry realises he shouldn't have meddled with the status quo.
• Alliterative Name: Barry B. Benson.
• Alphabet News Network: BeeNN is spoofing the most well-known real-life example, CNN.
• Artistic License – Biology: Despite being "The Bee Movie" the film gets almost nothing right about bees.
  • The opening monologue about it being physically impossible for Bees to fly is based on an outdated scientific study originally published in the 1930s. Later scientific studies have long since explained how bees are able to fly, but it's less funny that way. ^note The original study relied on the assumption that bee wings flap up and down, the same as winged vertebrates likes Birds and Bats. We now know that Bees actually flap their wings front to back and that the rapid front to back flapping generates what is known as a Leading Edge Vortex that allows the wings to generate a large amount of Lift for the bee to get airborne.
  • The film showcases the bee colony as a mixture of male and female workers. The pollen jocks in particular are depicted as an elite all male caste of workers. In reality, all the workers in a bee colony are female, including all of the workers that leave the hive to collect nectar and pollinate flowers as the pollen jocks do in the film. Male bees only exist as reproducing drones who leave the colony to mate with virgin queens of other colonies of the same species and then promptly die.
  • Male bees don't have stingers, as the stinger in Hymenopterans like bees, wasps, and hornets is a modified female egg laying organ called the ovipositor which male bees obviously lack.
  • All of the bees in a real hive are the children of the Queen, and don't have individual families. The film actually brings this up, claiming that Barry's parents aren't actually his real parents, but that raises even more questions.
  • It is biologically impossible for a bee to survive stinging a man and having the stinger replaced with a plastic sword, as the stinger is connected to numerous vital organs that come out with it if it is used to sting someone. Particularly notable because the movie itself brings up the fact that bees die if they sting someone.
  • Plants don't wither and die if they're not pollinated; the lack of pollination would only stop new flowers from being made, and plants would live as normal (especially obvious with the trees that would still live for years). Also, it is impossible to pollinate most flowers with pollen from other species. Furthermore, even if the bees stop, there's still the hummingbirds/butterflies/etc. to pollinate as well. Losing every bee would be catastrophic (especially for farming), but bees don't have dibs on all pollination. Many species don't need animals at all, relying on the wind alone for pollination, and would be perfectly fine and ordinary.
  • Sting (the singer) gets arrested for his stage name since it's a bee thing. Wasps, bumblebees, mud daubers, yellow jackets, stingrays, hornets, scorpions, platypi, and jellyfish would like to have a word, and that's just inside of the animal kingdom. Especially baffling as the name "Sting" is actually trademarked to professional wrestler Steve Borden, who has the Animal Motif of a scorpion.
• Artistic License – Law: Adam is allowed to continue taking part in the lawsuit after attacking the defendant's lawyer. He should have instead been facing a slew of charges including disrupting courtroom proceedings, second-degree felony assault, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder (since Layton is allergic to bee venom), and contempt of court. Not to mention, his assault would also have tainted the entire jury so the case would have to be halted and restarted with a fresh jury... and that's if the judge didn't decide to dismiss the case with or without prejudice as a result of Adam's outburst.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: The orientation tour guide in the beginning of the film makes a joking remark about how bees have not had a day off in 27 million years. However, this timeframe is inaccurate as Honeybees first appeared about 34 million years ago and bees as a group first evolved about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.
• As Himself: Larry King plays Bee Larry King.
  Barry: You know, there's a Larry King in the Human world too!
  • The Sting from the Police and Ray Liotta also appear as themselves.
• Bait-and-Switch: During the news broadcast, the anchor-bees are listed one by one, each seemingly having a bee-related Punny Name: Bob Bumble, Storm Stinger, Buzz Larvi, and... Jeanette Chung.
• Bathroom Brawl: Ken attacks Barry in Vanessa's bathroom and she breaks up with him for it.
• Bears Are Bad News: Bears are hated by bees for destroying their hives and eating their honey.
• Beehive Hairdo: As a sort of Visual Pun, all the female bees seen have fifties-style hair that's puffed on top and curled at the sides.
• B-Movie: In addition to the Pun-Based Title, the film unabashedly satirizes no less than five separate genres over the course of its runtime (family, romance, court drama, disaster, action) with the explicit intention by the writers to be as out-there as possible.
• Big Applesauce: All the plant life in the world is saved—once Central Park is restored, first.
• Bizarre Dream Rationalization: When Barry talks to Vanessa for the first time, she brushes it off as her dreaming, even though she doesn't remember going to bed. After stabbing her own hand with a fork, she realizes that a bee really is talking to her.
• Bloodless Carnage: Vanessa stabs her hand with a fork as a dream reality check when Barry starts speaking to her. There are holes where the prongs of the fork stabbed, but no blood.
• Broken Masquerade: It's indicated that humans are unaware that bees are sapient and can talk, and bees in return keep their sapience a secret out of fear of the humans. Barry breaks the tradition when he develops a crush on Vanessa and decides to thank her for saving him, and when he discovers that the humans have stolen honey from the bees while mistreating them, he sues the human race, breaking the masquerade and revealing to the world at large the bees' sapience. By the end of the movie, it's indicated that other animals have begun following Barry's example and revealed themselves to the world, with a cow seeking legal advice regarding humanity's usage of milk.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Played for Laughs. Rather than merely being employees who are just doing their jobs, the two human beekeepers that Barry spies on when infiltrating Honey Farms are vilified to a cartoonish degree, openly bragging about how they exploit the bees in their care and seemingly taking sadistic pleasure from it. If either of the men had been designed with moustaches, they would certainly be twirling them.
  They make the honey, and we make the money.
• Career Path Concerns: Shortly after graduating, Barry has a hard time deciding what job he wants, after he and his classmates are told that they're only allowed to work one job for the rest of their lives (they are honeybees, after all). His parents insist that he becomes a stirrer, while his friend Adam doesn't think too much about it. In the end, Barry ends up becoming a Pollen Jock.
• Comically Missing the Point: Barry winds up inside a human family's car and scares the entire family. When the mom yells for everyone to "freeze!" so Barry won't sting them, Barry freezes in place too, clearly thinking she was talking to him.
• Company Cross-References: Vincent the bear from Over the Hedge makes a brief appearance during the courtroom trial, albeit with brown fur instead of the black fur he had before.
• Contrived Coincidence: After having already had one encounter with Vanessa and Ken during a tennis game in the park which ends with him being launched far into the city, Barry has to search for shelter when it starts raining. Somehow, of all the hundreds or so apartments he could have entered, he picks Vanessa's apartment just as she and Ken have returned home, setting the main plot into place.
• Credits Gag:
  • Under "Special Thanks", Steven Spielberg is listed as a "Cinematic Visionary Dinner Companion", Jeffrey Katzenberg is listed as a "Deus ex Machina (Hand of God", and Bill Damaschke is acknowledged as a "Voice of Sanity".
  • Bill Phillips is billed under providing "physical fitness for Mr. Benson and Mr. Seinfeld".
  • While there are no scenes involving pizza, Chris Bianco, the owner of Pizzeria Bianco, is listed as a "pizza consultant".
• Daydream Surprise: Barry has one about Vanessa.
• Dark Parody: At one point, Winnie the Pooh gets shot with a sleeping dart and kidnapped.
• Despair Event Horizon: After the bees win the court case and their honey is confiscated from humans, Barry gradually realizes that their victory has completely disrupted the balance of nature, with all the flowers dying and Vanessa's shop being closed down. When he and Vanessa sit down to observe all the damage they've caused, they become so depressed that Barry even suggests they make a suicide pact.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Exaggerated. Barry openly compares the bee farms to hard labor camps, and later claims that the bees within them are "slaves to the white man". Further driving the point, the farm he visits is shown in a manner not dissimilar to a concentration camp, complete with the bees being gassed (albeit non-fatally) on a regular basis.
• Dream Reality Check: Vanessa stabs the back of her hand with a fork to wake herself up when Barry talks to her for the first time. But it's not a dream.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: "Well, I was already a blood-sucking parasite! All I needed was a briefcase!"
• Experts Unavailable: In the film's climax, while trying fly a bunch of flowers to his and Vanessa's hometown to repollinate the Earth, Barry tries to talk the plane's pilots into not stopping. He startles both of them into accidentally knocking each other unconscious. Thus, Vanessa (a florist with no flight experience) is left to try and fly the plane with Barry (and later the rest of his hive) coaching her.
• Expy Coexistence: Played for Laughs. When he's being interviewed by Bee Larry King (voiced by the man himself), Barry openly points out that there's also a human Larry King, who also has his own talk show that's virtually identical to this one.
• Fan Disservice: Layton T. Montgomery stretching his britches out. And then flashing his rear end to the court to show where Adam stung him. Much to everyone's disgust.
• Fantastic Aesop: The first acts seem to be preaching against human exploitation of animals, and that it's wrong to take bees' honey... but then it acknowledges bees make much more honey than they could ever use, and that bees not needing to pollinate would be completely and utterly catastrophic for the planet. So, by the end, the message can best be summed up as "Humans should use and appreciate honey, but they should probably discuss it with the sapient, talking bees first."
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Vanessa tells Barry that her parents wanted her to become a doctor or a lawyer but Vanessa wanted to be a florist instead as her only interest is flowers.
• Fantasy Twist: Barry's daydream about Vanessa and himself having a romantic picnic together ends abruptly as Vanessa pilots a yellow and black ultralight to fly with him, then crashes and burns when she tries to duplicate an aviation feat only bees can accomplish.
• Four-Fingered Hands: All the bees have four fingers.
• Four-Legged Insect: The bees, as well as all the other bugs, have four limbs instead of six. Oddly, Barry's shoes are arranged in groups of six on his shelf.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Successfully advocating for a cause might actually make things worse, especially if you don't do the proper research about what you're advocating for or against in the first place.
• Hey, You!: Ken doesn't like that Barry is taking up his girlfriend Vanessa's time and has a tendency to rudely call him "bee" when they talk.
• Hollywood Law: The whole "sue humanity because they're stealing honey from bees" is done in a way that doesn't work. Apart from all the "they're just animals" issues being done away with (legally, bees are chattel, owned by humans who are legally permitted to reap their produce), there's enough to fill a LegalEagle video:
  • A florist cannot help sue another party in court. Vanessa is engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. She also doesn't properly handle the letter that starts the lawsuit (you have to go down to the courthouse in person to file the suit, you can't just stick an envelope in the mail), and it's also addressed to the "Superior Court of New York." The trial court for civil suits in New York State is known as the Supreme Court.^note This is likely a result of the writers being based in Southern California, where the trial courts for civil matters are known as "superior courts"
  • Barry sues the five largest honey manufacturers on behalf of the bees they exploit. This is a class action lawsuit (in which a few representative plaintiffs claim to be representative of a larger class of people, and thus believe that they should be able to prosecute the lawsuit on behalf of all of those people who are similarly affected). Per the federal definition of a class action lawsuit, there are some requirements that have to be met before they can proceed further per Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure:
    • 1) There needs to be an adequate class definition. ("All bees" is not an adequate class definition, especially considering that not all bees have had their honey taken)
    • 2) The class needs to be ascertainable. (With how large the bees' population is, there is no way to identify the individually affected bees)
    • 3) There needs to be numerosity to the size of the class. (This is the only criterion met)
    • 4) There needs to be commonality amongst all of the class members. (Different bees are treated differently by the honey manufacturing companies)
    • 5) There needs to be typicality between the representative plaintiffs and the class members. (Barry isn't typical of the bees affected, as his hive is an urban hive in the middle of Manhattan, not a commercial one for honey harvesting)
    • 6) Adequacy of counsel. (Barry is not a lawyer, so he can't proceed with this proceeding, let alone adequately represent the actual class members.)
    • 7) Some other requirements (that are also not met for the above reasons)
  • This lawsuit goes straight to trial rather quickly, completely skipping over the many years of pretrial discovery, depositions and motions that would have to happen first.
  • When the defense presents their opening statements and case before the plaintiff does (when the plaintiff outlines what the matters in contention are), Mr. Montgomery goes straight from the counsel table directly into the well of the courtroom and then gets way too close to the jury box, which is a serious breach of courtroom etiquette. His opening statement is also a completely improper argument that would probably be stricken from the record. Barry commits the same breach of courtroom etiquette as Mr. Montgomery when he flies from counsel table over to the partition in front of the jury box to deliver his opening statement.
  • During the direct examination of Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden of Honey Farms and Barry's questions about why he uses honey jars shaped like bears, the opposing counsel really should've been objecting for relevance repeatedly. Then, to demonstrate how the bees find this jar design offensive ("BEARS KILL BEES"), Barry has a muzzled grizzly bear brought into the courtroom. Not only is this irrelevant to the court proceedings, but it goes without saying that demonstratives cannot be a lethal animal.
  • When Mr. Montgomery begins examining Barry and asks him questions about his relationship with Vanessa, people and bees should be interrupting with "Objection, relevance" and "objection, argumentative".
  • Mr. Montgomery's examination of Barry gets heated, and Adam eventually gives into his aggression and stings him, which is technically assault. After such an outburst, it's unlikely that Adam would even be allowed to attend court for the rest of the trial. In fact, it's likely the judge would have to declare a mistrial because it would be unfair to both the defendants and the plaintiffs to proceed with a tainted jury.
  • The court case is done in a courtroom in New York City, rather than the Supreme Court of the United States which is in Washington, D.C.; as a result, any patent rights the bees are granted wouldn't be applicable to the rest of the United States, let alone the other nations in North America (e.g. Canada and Mexico).
  • The trial is held with a jury. However, the judge ultimately declares her verdict without consulting the jury, making their presence completely arbitrary. Not to mention, the judge cannot decide in the middle of the court case to just rule in favor of the plaintiffs. This would be overturned on appeal immediately because the defendants have been denied their due process.
  • The settlement demands:
    • If the plaintiffs prevail in a lawsuit, generally they are entitled to monetary compensation. And in some cases, they can be rewarded with actual physical property (though that is largely seen in real estate cases). If it's possible to give financial compensation, the court almost always will go that way. And there's no reason that the bees couldn't be given financial compensation instead of a return of all of the honey.^note Unless they're arguing that honey is their form of currency On top of that, many of the other things that they are getting in this potential settlement would likely not be granted in real life.
    • "We will no longer tolerate derogatory bee-negative nicknames" (and Sting being arrested for this alone) and "We demand an end to the glorification of the bear as anything other than a filthy smelly big-headed bad breath stink machine!" overstep the First Amendment right to free speech. While derogatory bee-negative nicknames may be classified as hate speech on grounds of being species slurs, it also leaves the court's ruling open to species-discrimination countersuits by any talking bears that might be out there.
    • We see federal agents seizing honey from a woman on the street using it as a tea sweetener, with no indication that an injunction was granted to stop the consumption of honey already in circulation.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Part of Barry's case is how humans treat bees horribly, such as using a smoker to incapacitate them before removing honey. It is especially jarring with the two guys who seem to work at the honey plant just because they enjoy sadistically torturing bees. It might just be those guys, but those are the only two workers Barry sees, which might contribute to the whole thing.
• Humanlike Hand Anatomy: The bees have four-fingered hands that look like human hands.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • One scene early on has Adam about to flirt with a female bee before Barry chides him for it, as they're all cousins in the hive. This doesn't stop Barry himself from flirting with some other female bees too, which he justifies as them being distant cousins when Adam reminds him of their relation.
  • Later, Barry is shown to be racist against bears, with one of his demands being "an end to the glorification of the bear as anything other than a filthy smelly big-headed bad breath stink machine"... even though he had no problem bringing a bear into the courtroom to help win his court case, even thanking said bear for their performance.
  • Barry demands that an end to "derogatory bee-negative nicknames"... and then goes on to call bears a "filthy smelly big-headed bad breath stink machine", itself a very derogatory bear-negative nickname.
• I Love the Smell of X in the Morning: When Ken attacks Barry in the bathroom, he sprays him with perfume spray.
  Barry: I love the smell of flowers!
  Ken: Oh, yeah? How do you like the smell of FLAMES?! (holds up a lighter in front of the perfume spray)
  Barry: Not as much!
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • Barry is just Jerry Seinfeld with wings and stripes.
  • Also, Ray Liotta and Sting both appear as themselves. The primary purpose of Bee Larry King's one scene interviewing Barry on BeeNN is lampshading his similarity to the human version.
• Insect Gender-Bender:
  • Male mosquitoes don't drink blood (and females only drink it so they can get the protein to make eggs).
  • Male bees don't sting. The stinger is a modified ovipositor that only female worker bees have. On top of that, there's no such thing as a male worker. In a beehive (as well as an anthill and a wasp's nest), all of the grunt work is done by infertile females. This includes pollinating, which the movie shows male bees doing. Really, the only purpose of a male bee in real life is to mate with the queen, then die.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Barry and Vanessa. It leads to "bedbug" jokes.
  • Barry's uncle and the cricket in San Antonio.
• It Only Works Once: At Honex, once you pick your job, you stay with that job forever with no way out of it.
• Jerk Jock:
  • Subverted. Early in the movie there's a scene where it looks like the pollen jockeys are going to turn out to be like nasty and arrogant, inviting Barry along on their next scheduled nectar run to mess with him, but when he actually shows up, they're perfectly happy to show him the ropes and are quite personable about the whole thing.
  • Perhaps played straight with the Patrick Warburton character, though, given how he's played as an antagonist and is a tennis player.
• Jealous Romantic Witness: Ken is not happy when he sees Vanessa and Barry having an innocent celebratory dinner after his court hearing.
• Just Plane Wrong: Aside from everything else that's obviously wrong with the entire scene, Vanessa is shown pulling the landing gear handle to shut down the plane's engines.
• Kissing Cousins: In the beginning, Adam makes a comment about a girl next to them being hot. Only to learn from Barry she's Barry's cousin.
  Adam: That girl was hot.
  Barry: She's my cousin!
  Adam: She is?
  Barry: Yes, we're all cousins.
  • And again later as a Brick Joke, when Barry tells Adam that the female bees will think they're attractive once they've noticed Adam and Barry are covered in pollen.
  Adam: Those ladies? Aren't they our cousins too?
  Barry: Distant. Distant.
• Language Fluency Reveal: Vanessa's reaction to hearing Barry talk at first seems like a case of You Can Talk?, but she asks him "How'd you learn to do... the talking thing?", implying that she was surprised that he knew how to do it rather than surprised by his physical ability to do it.
• Large Ham:
  • Layton T. Montgomery. He's even hammier after being stung because he deliberately makes it more dramatic. Thanks to being voiced by John Goodman.
  • Ken...is very enthusiastic when he speaks, and has a tendency for bad puns during violence. He is voiced by Patrick Warburton, no less.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Pooh and Piglet appear in one scene, with Piglet wearing a green sweater like he does in the original book instead of magenta.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Sting is briefly shown meditating in the lotus pose while levitating in one scene.
• Literal Metaphor: The "smoking gun" in Barry's lawsuit against the human race is a smoke-pumping gun used by beekeepers to knock bees out and steal their honey.
• Logo Joke: The boy in the film's DreamWorks logo is distracted by Barry as he's floating up to the moon with balloons. He ends up falling back to the ground while Barry sits on the moon in his place and lets out a chuckle.
• Make the Dog Testify: The courts don't bother making sure the bees can speak before allowing them to sue humanity.
• Maybe Ever After: It's ambiguous as to whether Barry and Vanessa enter a relationship by the end of the movie. Barry certainly seems to have a crush on her, they go on hangouts that can be taken as romantic dates, and Ken and Adam both comment on their potential romance at different points (with Ken outright accusing Barry of trying to steal her from him), but nothing is definitively confirmed either way.
• Meaningful Name: A florist named Vanessa Bloome (Bloom). As well as a bee named Barry B. Benson.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: When Montgomery puts too much pressure on Barry in the courtroom, Adam's protective instincts get the better of him and he flies to sting Montgomery in his butt. Despite being a simple bee sting, Montgomery makes it as dramatically as possible to use it as a statement against the bees' case.
  Montgomery: OOOOOOH, I'M HIT! Oh, Lordy, I'm hit! The venom—the venom is coursing through my veins! I have been felled by a winged beast of destruction! You see?! You can't treat 'em like equals! THEY'RE STRIPED SAVAGES! Stinging's the only thing they know! IT'S THEIR WAY!!! Ooooh, what angel of mercy will come forward to suck the poison from my heaving buttocks?!"
• Mistaken for Bluff: During Barry's and Ken's big fight in the bathroom, Barry falls in the toilet, and Ken threatens to flush Barry away. Barry claims he's bluffing, but Ken pulls the handle on him.
  Ken: Oh, look, a royal flush!
  Barry: You're bluffing.
  Ken: Am I?
• Mistaken for Romance: Barry and Vanessa's friendship is easily mistaken for romance by her ex-boyfriend Ken and Adam.
• Mouse World: Inside a beehive is a fully functioning multi-level metropolis.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Deliberately. Barry has a swordfight with a shelfstocker wielding a pushpin.
• Newscaster Cameo: NPR's Carl Kasell As Himself.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: To quote Mr. Montgomery after Benson won the lawsuit, "This is an unholy perversion of the balance of nature, Benson! You'll regret this." Turns out that now that the bees were put out of the job due to the honey being "brought back" to them, the pollination halted and the plant life was slowly dying out, with the rest of the food chain about to follow soon.
• One-Letter Pun:
  • Barry's dad congratulates him on "a perfect report card—all B's."
  • The movie's title is a pun on the term "B-movie."
• Outlandish Device Setting: The showerhead in Vanessa's bathroom has a setting for 'Lethal'.
• Parental Bonus: Too many to count, usually covered up by all the Bee puns.
  • When Barry's parents learn about Barry meeting a girl, they say they hope she's "Bee-ish" (Yiddish).
  • When Barry's parents pester him about his job search and academic future, Barry is just lazily drifting around in a pool similar in reference to The Graduate.
  • The film gets away with a Kissing Cousins joke simply because they're bees, and Barry enunciates that they're distant cousins.
  • Barry's uncle reminisces about dating a cricket once, adding, "Boy, those crazy legs kept me up all night", which would imply they slept together... or, if more innocently refer to the cricket rubbing its legs together to make its characteristic noise.
  • Mr. Montgomery interrogating Barry if he lives with Vanessa and if he's her "little bedbug."
  • When giving his final statement in court, Barry asks "is this what nature intended for us? To live out our lives as honey slaves to the white man!", while the scene cuts to Montgomery's four lawyers, one of whom is black (this person then awkwardly shifts his chair away from the others).
  • "Shack up with a grasshopper". It can mean just being roommates, but...
  • The discussion between Barry and Adam about who the girl Barry met is. Apparently, spiders are thought of as very hot due to having eight legs.
  • When Barry comments that Blood the Mosquito must meet a lot of girls, Mosquito laments that girl mosquitoes always "trade up" to date a Moth or a Dragonfly instead of him.
  • Barry asking the store clerk who is his supplier. He's talking about honey, but still.
  • When a hive of bees gassed for their honey tell Barry they had no choice and they had to move because of their queen. Barry points out that their "queen bee" is actually a man in women's clothes. In other words, he's a "drag queen".
  • Layton T. Montgomery accusing Barry in court of "being on steroids".
  • Adam describing stinging someone as "adrenaline and then, ecstasy".
  • Layton T. Montgomery says that the queen bee delivers all the young and accuses Barry's parents of not being his real parents and accuses Barry of being illegitimate.
  • Barry saying that his sweater is Ralph Lauren and that he is not wearing pants.
  • Barry saying that everyone is aware of "what bears do in the woods".
• Playing Games at Work: The director of the Honex Industries can be seen playing a hexagon-shaped Solitaire at his computer during Barry's motivational speech at the end. Justified in that at the time, the honey production was shut off and the bees had nothing to do.
• Pun-Based Title: It's rumored that the title began as a joke Jerry Seinfeld made to Steven Spielberg, who pointed him to Jeff Katzenberg to make it into a movie.^note The rest of the conversation supposedly went "We're creative people with lots of money. We can do whatever we want!" Yes, really.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Ken, a Large Ham with a hatred for Barry, at one point mentions how he doesn't like honey and says "And for your information, I prefer sugar-free artificial sweeteners MADE! BY! MAN!", putting more emphasis on "made by man" than he needs to, after Vanessa stops Ken from almost murdering Barry.
• Removed Species Calamity: After Barry wins the lawsuit against humanity, humans are no longer allowed to harvest honey and the stolen honey is returned in overload to every hive, making it so that the bees no longer have to produce honey and effectively removing bees from the ecosystem. This results in an ecocrisis as plants begin to die out from there not being bees to pollinate them.
• Reused Character Design: The bear that is brought into the courtroom is basically just Vincent from Over the Hedge with his black fur turned brown.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanour: In-Universe. Following Ray Liotta's violent outburst in court, an issue of Variety reveals that his behaviour has prompted an unnamed studio (presumably, 20th Century Fox) to cancel a sequel to Unlawful Entry.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: It is Seinfeld as a bee.
  Vanessa: (Looking down at two unconscious pilots) What happened here?
  Barry: I tried to talk to them! But then there was a Dustbuster, a toupee, a life raft exploded! Now, one's bald, one's in a boat, and they're both unconscious!
• Serious Business: The montage where the honey is reclaimed. The ATHF holds a little old woman stirring honey into her tea at gunpoint. They even shoot Winnie the Pooh with a tranquilizer dart! Pooh's adventures will never be the same anymore.
• She Is the King: Gender inverted.
  Barry: This is your queen? That's a man in women's clothes. That's a drag-queen!
• Shout-Out:
  • Barry B. Benson is named in honor of Benson, in which Jerry Seinfeld landed his first role as a character named Frankie in three episodes of the second season.
  • "Turn your key sir!" from the movie WarGames, a film that Matthew Broderick (who voiced Adam) starred in.
  • After Ray Liotta unleashes his temper on Barry during the trial, there is a section on the newspaper stating Unlawful Entry 2 will be canceled.
  • Klauss Vanderhayden lists a few examples of "lovable" bears: Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear and Build-A-Bear.
• Shown Their Work: It's clear the company did a fair amount of research, then overruled it in favor of the Rule of Funny.
• Smoking Gun: Used literally. Barry shows up with a smoke gun used to calm down honeybees. Bees win the case against humans.
• Struggling Shop: Barry wins the lawsuit and gets the humans to give all the honey back to the bees. Now that they have a massive surplus of honey, the bees shut down the honey factory and stop going out to pollinate flowers. This leads to his human friend, Vanessa, having to close her flower shop... and humanity dealing with the way bigger problem of all the plants in the world beginning to die out.
• Suicide Pact: When all of New York’s plants are dying out thanks to the lack of bees pollinating them, Barry actually suggests committing to a suicide pact where he will sting Vanessa and Vanessa will step on him. Vanessa points out him stinging her and her stepping on him will just kill him twice.
• Tagline: At least two, displayed on official posters - "Hold on to your honey" and "Honey just got funny".
• Take That!:
  • When Vanessa complains to Barry that she doesn't know how to land a plane, he replies:
  Barry: Didn't you say John Travolta was a pilot?
  Vanessa: Yeah...
  Barry: How hard could it be?!?!
  • Winnie the Pooh being tranquilized for eating honey is almost identical to the Disney version, with only slight changes to keep it copyright-friendly.
• Talk Show Appearance: During his crusade to sue humanity, Barry goes on "Bee Larry King" to promote his ideas, and also tells the bee host about his human counterpart.
• Tiny Flyer, Huge Cargo: During the climax, all of the bees swarm the underside of a plane and land it to safety after the human pilots are incapacitated.
• Unconventional Courtroom Tactics:
  • While waiting for the Smoking Gun to arrive, Adam stalls by teaching the jury how to make paper boats.
  • Barry brings a live and aggressive bear into the courtroom as a Demonstrative. Needless to say, no court would allow such a thing.
• Undignified Death: Discussed. Barry openly mocks another bee called Frankie for wasting his one sting on a squirrel^note as in real life, bees in the movie die once they sting something, calling him a "hothead" and refusing to go to his funeral.
• Unfulfilled Purpose Misery: After Barry wins the lawsuit against humanity and gets them to give all the honey back to the bees, the bees stop making honey because they have way more than they could ever need in their lifetimes. Without anything to do, they are reduced to lounging around listlessly in their homes.
• Unusual Euphemism: The corrupt judge interrogating Barry, asking if he lives with Vanessa and if he's her "little bedbug."
• Visual Pun: All the male bees wear buzzcuts, while the female bees wear beehive hairdos.
• Wearing It All Wrong: Exploited when Ken puts winter boots on his hands and tries to kill Barry with them.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Ken disappears from the plot following his confrontation with Barry, though he returns for a moment at the end to express his frustration at Barry "living his life", and Mr. Montgomery disappears from the plot after Barry wins the trial.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Discussed between Vanessa and Ken when he tries to squish Barry.
  Vanessa: Don't kill him!
  Ken: You know I'm allergic to them! This thing could kill ME!
  Vanessa: And why does his life have any less value than yours?
  Ken: "Why does his life have any less value than mine?", Is THAT your statement?
  Vanessa: I'm just saying all life has value, you don't know what he's capable of feeling.
• With Catlike Tread: Barry tells Vanessa his plan to steal the parade float so that the bees can take its pollen and spread it to the other flowers so that everything will bloom. They sneak in while disguised (badly), they drive the float out (by crashing through a fence) and blending in with traffic (a float stuck in traffic will stick out). Somehow, this all works.
• World of Pun: The film is shameless in using as many bee puns as possible - Barry getting all B's on a report card, Barry being referred to as a "newbie" ("new bee") by one of the pollen jocks, and the musician Sting showing up since bees sting, are just the tip of the iceberg.
• You Can Talk?: Vanessa's reaction to Barry, a bee, speaking to her so that he can thank her for saving his life. She points out he's talking, believes she's dreaming but tells Barry that she doesn't remember going to sleep, then stabs herself with a fork to wake up before realizing she really is speaking with a bee.