Long live the Mayan Bee…, the celebrations for the 50th birthday of the historical anime never end: on December 11th, Maya the Bee – the Musical will debut in Italy starting from the San Babila Theater in Milan produced by DeAPlanet Entertainment, All Crazy Art & Show and SM Sales & consulting, fitting into an ongoing nostalgia operation for many other historical Japanese animation.
The character’s story has a European origin, as often in Japanese animation, in Waldemar Bonsels’ 1912 German novel Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (The Mayan Bee and his adventures), designed for children, but interpretable in a nationalistic key, and therefore also read by adults during the First World War.
The international success of Maya the Bee came thanks to the Japanese adaptationunlike many others souls with a similar story, not through the comic mediation of the manga, but directly animated by Nippon Animation, in co-production with the German publisher Bastei Verlag, which has completely changed the target, making it an animated version designed for children aged between nursery school and primary school.
The protagonist, Maia, is a baby bee, tender and reckless, with an anthropomorphic appearance with arms and legs to be able to walk upright and a head of blonde curls like honey which gives her a feminine and cheeky look, made friendly by an irresistible smile and animated by an indomitable curiosity that leads her to explore the world, naively, usually getting herself into a lot of trouble. Her inseparable friend, Willy, a bit of a crybaby, acts as her counterpart and, unlike her, an adventurer bordering on recklessness, rather fearful and prudent, often called upon to get her out of trouble, with the help of the adults in the situation: the teacher Cassandra and the grasshopper Flip, a wise and lazy narrator who sums things up for the young spectators and sometimes seems to evoke a quote from the Talking Cricket of Collodian memory, but nice and less pedantic.
Sunny and tender, naive at times, the series, which in two installments reached over 100 episodes, then had a cinematic and serial continuation in 3D computer graphics (currently available on Raiplay).
TWO great cultural merits
The great merit of the Maya Bee was, in its instructive lightness, to give generations of children, without pedantry and didacticism, the notion of ecosystem and biodiversitythat is, the awareness of the fact that the environment must be respected in its balance, in which everyone has a role, which often enters into interaction and competition with that of other animal or plant species. Anyone who observes them from the point of view of a young insect perceives them as friends or enemies, and here the concept of prey/predator is introduced, but understands that they have a natural relationship between them which makes no sense to translate into a moral/human judgement: the spider Tecla is scary, she does and must scare Maia and Willy, who must learn to watch out for her, to escape her, but she is not bad, she simply obeys her nature, follows the laws of the role that the ecosystem assigns to her.
The other great merit was to provide many notions about the world of insects with effective and witty ideas: for example, when a branch that has fallen across a gutter risks causing a flood, the strategy is to wake up from the siesta and rush a group of baby termites to have a snack, thus teaching, without having any, the knowledge that termites feed on wood and can, if necessary, undermine large wooden structuresi, with a representation so light and amusing that the notion remains for life, more impressed than any image on the subsidiary could leave it.
MAIA AND MAGà, the first of a successful and original genre
Despite having been created in 1975 and therefore a few months later thanBee Maga, theMaya Bee it arrived in Italy a few months earlier, in 1979, and is therefore for our country the forerunner of a long and interesting animated production on the world of insects.
The Ape Maga produced by Tatzunoko, a series also aimed at children, it is less, so to speak, a naturalistic tutorial and more a dramatic struggle for survival, in which the small, angular, defenseless protagonist must get by in the world after her hive is attacked by wasps. A bit like a lonely child like Remy, a bit like a world under threat Grendizer&Co style.
From then on, in different declinations, insects have produced various original and interesting experiments in animation, and also a bitter rivalry.
The almost simultaneous release of Antz/ Z the ant», the first computer graphics feature film from DreamWorks Animation, founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, and A bug’s LifeMegaminimondoPixar’s second short film, 1999 Oscar Nomination for Best Score (Comedy or Musical), in fact, it led Disney Pixar to accuse the rival company of plagiarismeven if the controversy never led to a definitive clarification of the case, also because the two films, net of the fact of having a male ant as the protagonist, the two films are very different: the first is an edgy political metaphor, the second is a rounded and hilarious musical comedy.
Finally he deserves a mention for his brilliance LowercaseFrench films and series of the 2000s, which animated drawn, non-speaking animals in real environments with astonishing effects for fun and originality.
