Seinfeld in the recording studio for Bee Movie Courtesy of DreamWorks Animation L.L.C.

Seinfeld admits to a fascination with the winged insects, which were always his first creatures of choice. He was particularly struck by their social similarity to the human hierarchical division of labor and by the fact that bees, too, have a corporate structure.

"Bees have a manufacturing company," he says, "and there are not a lot of animals that you could look at the same way. This is just like a big office building, and this is the product that they make. And any city to me is like a beehive, because you have lots of little spaces, you have little lanes of traffic, it is very crowded, and people are busy working. It is not like hyenas. You would not look at hyenas and say: 'Wait a minute! That is just they way we live.' But with bees it is."

The collision of the human and bee worlds is a story that could only be told through computer animation, Seinfeld says. But what made Bee Movie both attractive and viable to him was the fact that both Steven Spielberg and mega-producer Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted him to make it. Seinfeld was offered the keys to the studio — unprecedented in the film animation world.

"An animation studio has never had someone come in from the outside who doesn't know anything about animation and produce, write, direct, and star in their own movie," Seinfeld says. "So it was all those things together. I just thought this was a very unique opportunity. I had done the TV series and the movie offers I have had [have been with] actors, actresses, scripts, sets, cameras — I know how that works. I know what that is. I know how to do it. But this was all new. And the newness kind of energized me because I had kind of had my fill of it after nine years of television, 180 episodes, 90 hours of material. But this was like all new toys. A whole new way of expressing yourself through new technology.

"There is a certain part in the movie where the flowers all die and then, when they come back to life at the end, it is so beautiful in this animation. I didn't really plan that. Color is a wonderful thing to use in animation because it is very bright in these movies — more than it would be in live-action. And the honey is also very beautiful: the way they light it, the bubbles, and to see it rolling along."

Jerry Seinfeld, animation artist? How strange it must've been for this top comedian to experience the slow process of learning how to make an animated movie, and to have the unique opportunity to learn every aspect of the elaborate process.

"People who work in animation don't know as much as I know now, because I had to go through every phase of it and learn every step of it. It is like a beehive; most people work in [an] area and they know that area, and it is all divided up. There are 350 people that make these movies, and they all make it, but they make different parts of it; like this part just does hair, and this guy does water, and this woman creates the look of the character and the way the character moves, and this person does the teeth. And so everybody does a different thing, but I had to go through the whole system and learn it."

Although the movie fell under the direction of Steve Hickner (Prince of Egypt) and Simon J. Smith (who worked on visual effects for Shrek and Antz), it is apparent that Seinfeld was deeply embedded in every detail of the filmmaking process — from conceptualization to marketing and promotion.