The park and its adjoining West Side neighborhood is Jerry Seinfeld's home turf and the setting for Bee Movie. All images ™ & © 2007 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

It all started with a pun. And Steven Spielberg.

At least, that's what the production notes say by way of explaining the genesis of Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie. According to said notes, Jerry was over at Steven's beach house in the Hamptons for dinner (there's no mention as to whether Jerry bought some Entenmann's cake along for dessert) when the comic joked about making a film starring insects with the aforementioned title. Steven reached for the phone and called his DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg (who for more than a decade had been trying to talk Jerry into doing an animated feature); the next morning, Bee Movie was on DreamWorks' development slate.

Now, four years later, Bee Movie -- and its cartoon version of Seinfeld's Upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood -- is on the multiplex screens. Bridging that gap between New York City and DreamWorks' Glendale campus at first took a lot of traveling -- until technology stepped in to lend a hand.

Co-director Simon J. Smith scoured the park and the West Side to shoot reference pictures for the design staff. His goal was to achieve "stylistic realism."

"When we started out, Jerry had been spending a week a month in L.A. working on the film," Katzenberg explained to a preview audience at New York's Museum of Modern Art this past June. Then the company installed its ultra-high-end, "Star Trek-ian" teleconferencing system HP Halo in Seinfeld's New York office, allowing face-to-face communication and touchscreen interactivity between coasts as if the North American continent were not in the way. "It enabled Jerry to come to work every day, for eight hours a day," Katzenberg added. "It's the only reason the movie got made, with Jerry's life and family here in New York."

Seinfeld's sense of humor is rooted in the city as well, with the comic declaring New York "the Tigris and Euphrates of comedy. I seriously believe comedy, in the American idiom, was invented in the Lower East Side [then an immigrant neighborhood] in the 20th century by the Marx Brothers and all the vaudevillians." DreamWorks Animation also seems to be fond of New York humor, with Bee Movie the studio's third film (after Antz and Madagascar) featuring a Central Park setting. The park and its adjoining West Side neighborhood is Seinfeld's home turf; it was important for the filmmakers to get it right -- not just to please their star, but to give Bee Movie a realistic physical starting point out of which their fantasy version of Manhattan could grow.

After enduring a crash course in Animation 101 with Katzenberg, Seinfeld was ready to take on Bee Movie: "I pretended I knew what I was doing," Seinfeld admits. "I didn't know I would get that interested in an animation studio." As for the physical shtick, Seinfeld offers, "I thought of all these visual scenes that I never had a chance to express before -- a bee on a tennis ball or on an engine."

For co-director (with Steve Hickner) Simon J. Smith, that process began with scouring the neighborhood and the park itself to shoot reference pictures for the film's designers and conceptual artists. Smith's goal for the film's look was "a word we stumbled across in one of our meetings: 'stylism,' or stylistic realism. It's sort of middle ground between Beowulf or even Shrek, which have realistic textures, and Madagascar, which is very cartoony."

While actual textures are often imported into CGI films, "there are no photographic textures in Bee Movie," Smith boasts. "Everything was drawn and designed by us -- bark, wood grain, concrete, bricks -- before it was textured onto objects."

It is less than a month until the film's premiere, but visual effects supervisor Doug Cooper is still busy, tweaking the "color space" for each of the film's iterations -- film, digital cinema, DVD and broadcast -- to make sure they are all identical to the viewer's eye. Nonetheless, he takes time out to further expand on Smith's definition.