If you already have an age and we sing to you “In a Multicolored Country” you won’t be able to stop your brain from filling in the rest. And it is that ‘Maya the Bee’ was more than a children’s series, a religion. We saw it around here in 1978, but ‘Mitsubachi Māya no Bōken’, the original anime, was from three years earlier. However, it was not the first time that Maya could be seen on a screen. Only that the initial version was in real image and, seen now, it is frankly strange.
She was famous in the place
Actually, ‘Maya the Bee’ does not come from the anime, nor from the cinema, but from the first novel by Waldemar Bonsels, a German writer that in 1912, at the age of 32, he wrote ‘Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer’ (‘Maya the bee and her adventures’), which had a sequel three years later (‘People from the sky’) that begins as an animalistic fable and ends up being a philosophical and religious treatise.
Bonsels, years after Maya, would end up supporting the Nazi regime writing several antisemitic articles. Gives another perspective of the bee, like it or not, and it’s not hard to notice the clearly pro-military and nationalistic tone of the book, which are two things you didn’t expect to find in a fun article about Maya’s first movie. Now we come to that.
Bonsels’s novel was a resounding bestseller, and, of course, the next step was to take her to the movies. Keep in mind that although animation was not as developed as it is now, the German 1920s were light years ahead in the genre than most other countries, not only in terms of artistic quality but also in terms of the techniques used: the The first European animated film is, in fact, German, from 1926, ‘The Adventures of Prince Ahmed’. But no one thought of the animation for ‘Maya the Bee’. Or is it that there are no bees in real life?
welcome to honeycomb
Year 1924. Wolfram Junghans, a biologist friend of Waldemar Bonsels, decided to take his colleague’s book to the big screen in exchange for his help in photography of the movie. Both got down to work until they finished the six acts of a silent film with the same title as the novel: ‘Maya the Bee and her adventures’. The plan was perfect, a seen and not seen: Junghans himself had a terrarium of his own at the Berlin Zoo. What could go wrong? You already know the answer: everything.
What was going to be a simple shoot was extended to 21 months, because the bees, for whatever reason, do not know what an order is, and that made it impossible to complete a coherent filming plan. In fact, to clean up the chaos, Bonsels even ended up directing part of the film, taking charge of both a brief goblin scene and the intertitles. In the end, the 76 minutes of this fictional bee documentary and divided into six acts premiered on March 3, 1926 in Dresden, and later in Berlin.
The result was a resounding critical success at the time, and it was even reissued in 1934 in a 25-minute medium-length film with sound which, at the moment, is totally lost. It is not the only thing lost in this story: it was also believed that the film in question had disappeared in time, but in 2002 it was found almost in its entirety in the Finnish film archive after years of finding just bits and pieces around Germany. Since then, ‘Maya the Bee’ had a soundtrack made specifically for the DVD release, it has been screened at several festivals and is already a classic within the reach of any curious person.
the japanese bee
If we are now talking about the silent documentary film version of ‘Maya the Bee’ it is because we know its anime, 104 episodes divided into two series, ‘Maya the Bee’ and ‘The New Adventures of Maya the Bee’. Although in reality the continuation could not have been more forced, because at the end of the first series Maya returns to the honeycomb and becomes a teacher, without anyone explaining why in the second she already runs adventures again. The two series were broadcast in Japan between 1975 and 1980 and its design still serves now for the 3D movies and episodes that are released with relative success.
During the fifty years that passed between the film and the series, there were other projects with the bee as the most bizarre protagonist, such as a 1963 Czech children’s opera… but the really strong part came later. Little did Bonsels imagine that his ecological claim would end up becoming a boom full of merchandising, video games, 3D movies and even a web series. starring a woman dressed as a bee that you have to see to believe.
In Maya’s life there has been Nazis, silent movies, operas and even a hole to travel to Finland. The next time someone says “Hey, remember?” and start singing the song, you already have something to tell him to prevent him from sticking to you like Superglue. Well, okay, I can’t help it: a bee was born under the sooool, and was famous in the place…