Give Jerry Seinfeld the right opening to make a joke, and he’ll take it.

During a public preview of “Bee Movie,” a likable computer-animated tale that represents the “Seinfeld” star’s first foray into feature-length fiction, someone’s cell phone rings. Without missing a beat, Seinfeld launches into a bit on the disposable nature of the calls themselves: “You know how you know a cell phone call isn’t important? They’re calling you.” Later, answering whether or not he wrote and starred in “Bee Movie” because he has kids—he didn’t—the comedian-turned-actor riffs on how being a dad has turned him into a “small-time mob boss,” threatening to hurt Curious George if his daughter won’t get in the bath.

But “Bee Movie” is only a kids’ movie in the sense that it’s lovingly animated and tells the story of a rebel leaving the hive to fight for what he believes in. The main bee is Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), who refuses to become just another cog in the honey-making machine, preferring to see the world and talk to—gasp!—people, which is strictly forbidden in the bee community. When his new (human) friend/crush Vanessa (voiced by Renee Zellweger) shows him that people sell honey—bees’ life’s work—at grocery stores, Barry takes the entire human race to court.

Thanks to Seinfeld’s sense of humor, this not-so-childish set-up allows for lines like Barry’s best friend Adam (voiced by Matthew Broderick), upon hearing that his implicitly Jewish pal is interested in something other than a bee, asking, "Not a WASP?! Your parents will kill you!”

During a roundtable interview with Metromix, Seinfeld said that both kids and adults are responding to the movie but that he certainly didn’t mean to write it for children.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make something totally accessible. Because I always feel like that’s the trademark of something that stinks,” he says. “If it works for everybody, it works for nobody.”

As far as the origin of “Bee Movie”—the birds and the bees, if you will—the movie has an only-in-Hollywood history. The quick version: Seinfeld merely had the idea for the title—a play on words of “B-movie,” the usual description for low-budget junk—and told it to Steven Spielberg, who told it to his partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, who contacted Seinfeld and said he wanted to move forward without any concept of a story.

“I did not take it seriously,” Seinfeld says of the interest. "[I thought,] I’m not going to make a movie about bees. Do they really want that? Could I do it? How would I do it? I’m not moving back to L.A.”

But once he learned about the animation process, he was intrigued about bringing his brand of comedy into the form. And because he’s Jerry Seinfeld, the man who’s never hidden his love for Superman, he also dug animation’s opportunities to create Barry’s universe from scratch.

“What does he know? What can he do? What can’t he do? Can he talk to just her, or can he talk to anyone? How far can he fly? Who can fly? Who can’t fly? Every single thing you have to decide,” he says. “The sheet of paper was so blank that I couldn’t resist it.”

Of course, for a long time Seinfeld did resist breaking into movies. Aside from the 2002 documentary “Comedian,” the actor’s film appearances have been limited to cameos. Seinfeld says he was so burned out from “Seinfeld” that the prospect of making movies didn’t excite him.

“I had made 90 hours [of “Seinfeld.”] 90 hours is a career. That’s a whole career,” he says. “And to make another hour and a half, for what? To prove what?”

But writing “Bee Movie,” which he says is the hardest thing he has ever done, taught him a thing or two about the movie business.

“The challenge with making a movie vis-à-vis a television show is you are making the pilot episode and the series finale all rolled into one,” he says. “I don’t think I’m really cut out for it to tell you the truth. It’s much harder than I thought it would be. And I have much more respect for filmmakers than I ever had. I would never walk out of a movie now and go, ‘Ehh. Junk!’”

Audiences likely won’t feel that way about “Bee Movie,” though, at least because it presents them with the rare opportunity to see bees—typically ignored or demonized in animated movies—as heroes. Seinfeld knows why it’s taken so long for bees to get their due.

“I think people didn’t know how to handle the stinger aspect,” he says with his trademark smirk and "didja-ever-notice" tone. “They’re carrying a weapon, and they will not hesitate to use it.”

That’s the dry sense of humor that made him a TV star and could make him a viable moviemaker. Except that he admits he’s not a storyteller by nature.

“I am a stand-up comic. I like things short,” he says. “It took me years on the TV show to learn how to tell a 22-minute story. I didn’t really like doing that either. Larry [David] was great at the storytelling. I just liked the jokes.”