Why is MSCHF crowdsourcing a frame-by-frame recreation of 'Bee Movie'?

From a bizarre movie to a classic meme, Bee Movie is now a statement about digital piracy. Well, according to MSCHF, which launched a crowd-sourced version of Bee Movie for its latest digital campaign.

Entitled The Free Movie, the project from the art collective behind the Big Red Boots and the microscopic handbag is a hand-drawn, frame-by-frame recreation of the animated film that's entirely sourced from the internet. People can now go to thefreemovie.buzz and trace a frame from Dreamworks' original 2007 flick. MSCHF will then stitch together all 65,520 frames and release it as a full-length film — free for the internet to consume. Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, and that's exactly the point.

You can be a part of recreating a free, crudely-drawn version of 'Bee Movie.' Credit: MSCHF

If you're wondering why the Bee Movie, you've probably never asked yourself, "ya like jazz?" The film was a moderate success upon release, but it's since found enduring online fame for its highly meme-able moments, like the aforementioned jazz clip and an utterly baffling storyline where a woman falls in love with a bee.

But The Free Movie isn't just an amateur remake of a meme-able film. It's a statement about ownership as tech and media companies tighten their grip on copyrighted works. "The golden age of collaborative internet action (Reddit Place and Button, [Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson's project] Moon, others) reflect an optimism about collective play online that has dwindled as the internet has matured," MSCHF explained via email to Mashable. "No one feels particularly hopeful for situations where a crowd of people can just come together and fuck around. Free Movie is, of course, a guided prompt, but comes from that same, perhaps outdated, hopefulness."

When Jerry Seinfeld's bee character asked about jazz, it was all over. Credit: MSCHF

Thinking about Napster or Pirate Bay, the issue of piracy is a longstanding controversy that brings up questions of ownership and compensation in the internet age. Musicians, filmmakers, and other artists have rightfully fought for their earnings, but in reality, streaming platforms end up reaping most of the profits. And now, streaming platforms like Disney+, Hulu, and Max have been removing media from their inventory altogether, essentially erasing films and shows from the public eye. Piracy is generally considered a no-no, but what if, the project asks, it's the only way to preserve an archive?

As MSCHF puts it, "Free Movie’s central impulse of crowd ownership of culture is under threat."

It's a bold take, made even more potent by recent news involving OpenAI and Google using personal data scraped from the web to train their models. But MSCHF sees an important distinction: "We like it when people steal from companies, and not the other way around."