The Hive I Left Behind 

When I think of animation, I think of nostalgia. Toys talking, cars talking, a house lifted by balloons. I haven't actively watched much animation in the longest time, and yet when I think of it, only one film comes to mind: The Bee Movie. A film I haven't seen many times, but one that has always stayed in my head as one of my most formative watches.

My grandfather used to pick me up from school when my parents were still at work, and those few hours at his place were the best part of my week. He would take me to the cinema, buy me the tastiest popcron, and we would sit together watching things like a bee navigating a world far bigger than his own. Those afternoons were our little revolts against my mother, who scolded him for not making me finish my school work.

My grandfather passed away in 2020, the same year I was applying to universities. A few days after he died, my mum told me something he had said to her - "How strange it would be if Adhiraj went abroad to study? How would we manage without seeing him?" He said that, and then a few days later, he was gone. Now I am the one unable to manage without seeing him.

So I thought this article would be about that. The cinema trips, the childhood, the memory of watching something silly and warm with someone I loved.

Then I rewatched The Bee Movie. Alone. In my university dorm room in Vancouver, on a screen significantly smaller than any cinema my grandfather ever took me to. No one to laugh with. And with nobody at home even knowing I was watching it - my mum so far away in India that she has no idea what I do with my afternoons anymore, let alone which films I spend them on. I finished my last classes at university a week ago and am graduating in three weeks. And I sat there watching a talking bee navigate a world that was not built for him, and I thought: I know exactly what this film is about.

The Bee Movie is an immigration story.

Barry B. Benson graduates from his 3 days at university and is told to pick one job for the rest of his life. The hive has a system, a system that has been working well. Everyone fits into it neatly. Barry looks at this and thinks there has to be something else to his life. In an act of revolution, he sneaks out of the hive with the Pollen Jocks - the elite few who fly beyond the hive walls - and steps into the vast, overwhelming human world for the first time. The scale of everything is unlike anything the hive ever prepared him for.

When I was finishing high school in India, a lot of my friends were going abroad to study. No one in my family had ever done it before, and hence, there were a lot of questions. I still ended up leaving India because I believed there was something in the West that I couldn't find in the comfort of my own home. The animated world Barry sees for the first time - limitless, alive, the place where things happen - that is exactly how I thought of Canada. And just like Barry, I left without fully understanding what I was flying into.

In the grocery store, Barry stands in the aisle and sees shelves lined with honey - the labour of his entire community, packaged and sold and consumed by people who never once thought about the bees behind it. There is a version of that feeling in the immigrant experience too. Seeing things from home - food, music, ways of living - lifted out of their context, repackaged, made palatable for a different audience, with everything that originally made them meaningful quietly removed.

Mooseblood, the mosquito Barry ran into during one of his journeys in the new world, while hanging off the windshield of a speeding car, tells Barry to stay perfectly still - the humans will wipe anything that moves. A friend of mine who had been in Canada for a few years before I arrived used to talk about the comments he received from the locals. Not the loud ones. Not the obvious ones. The ones delivered as jokes, with a smile, where the punchline was him.

What I understand now, rewatching it, is that Barry's real struggle is not the lawsuit or the courtroom. It is the moment he first speaks to Vanessa and realises that he has broken the fundamental rule - bees do not talk to humans. Just making contact across that divide is in itself a transgression. There is something in that which feels true about arriving somewhere as an outsider. Not the dramatic confrontations, just the constant low-level negotiation of being someone from somewhere else, figuring out which rules apply to you and which ones apply to the people born there.

When I watched the Bee Movie at the age of four, sitting next to my grandfather, I was watching a funny film about a talking bee. I laughed at the jokes. Something the animated world gave to me then was empathy for creatures that didn't speak to me in a language I recognised.

At twenty-two, the same film spoke to me in a completely different way. Not outward empathy but something more inward - recognition. The bee is navigating a world larger than anything he prepared for, trying to hold onto who he is while everything around him tells him what he should be. That is not a children's story. That is just the story of arriving somewhere new and figuring out whether you can survive it without becoming unrecognisable to yourself.

Barry does survive it. He even changes the world a little. But the most honest moment in the film might be the smallest one - when Adam, his friend, says to him, after Barry returns to the hive: ‘You did come back different’.

You always come back different. Or you don't come back at all. That is the thing about leaving the hive that no one tells you before you go.