By Fred Topel | Images property of DreamWorks Animation.
Bee Movie
Patrick Warburton has done many recognizable voices. He's Joe on Family Guy, Kronk in The Emperor's New Groove and even Buzz Lightyear in the Star Command TV series. His old buddy Jerry Seinfeld called him for a role in Bee Movie, not as a bee but as the loser human boyfriend to his love interest. The brainchild of Seinfeld himself, Jerry was in all the recording sessions with Warburton.
Warburton Talks Bee Movie
"He actually does know what he wants so he will guide you in that direction," said Warburton. "At the same time, he'll let you just pick up the ball and run with it and do whatever you want too and see what happens. So it's a really good mix working with Jerry of him encouraging you to go in a certain area and let you do whatever you want going in that direction."
Unusually for animated films, Warburton and Seinfeld would record lines in the same session, even if they overlapped dialogue. "It didn’t seem like that was an issue. I guess if you overlap, you'd just go at it again, because there's definitely overlapping. I think at this point, the discipline I don't know, it seems to me they might be able to extricate, pull out whatever it is that you did even if there is an overlap just because you're on one mic and they're on another. I think that might be a possibility because there were times we did a take and there was definite overlap."
Bee Movie
Bee Movie
Ken, Warburton's character, has a pronounced chin and beefy upper body. Somehow all of Warburton's characters end up looking that way. "It was funny because I had and it was about a week later. My little guy Shane came up and crawled into our bed and he just had one question for me. He goes, 'Dad, why do all your characters look like you?' He hadn't even seen Bee Movie. He's got a doozy coming. He thinks Kronk looks like me, he thinks Joe looks like me but this guy Ken is really like every one of my goofiest features times 10."
When it came to the cartoon love triangle, Warburton never thought of the human/bee issue. "If you're just looking at the emotion of insecurity, just being insecure about a relationship, it doesn't matter who or what it is. If you find that they're stepping on your toes, if they're moving in, you can get really insecure. You start to forget that it's a bee. It's not a bee, it's a relationship. She's having a relationship with somebody other than you and that just makes Ken lose his mind. So it's fun. It's really fun getting to be involved in something that's so absurd. It's absurd but it's real. I think you can accept the reality of the fact that he can't compete with a bee. He's not a bee. Obviously, there's something going on there but you think that you can accept the reality. It's fine."
Bee Movie opens to theatres on November 2nd.
For the trailers, posters, stills and more movie info, go to the Bee
Movie Movie Page.
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