Cannes can be blas� about promotional stunts, but this teaser for the Dreamworks animated feature The Bee Movie - written and conceived by Seinfeld, in which he voices a talking bee who develops a crush on Ren�e Zellweger when he falls into her fondue - drew genuine Oooooos from festival crowds.

Apparently Dreamworks lawyers and insurance executives were in negotiation for six months before cover could be arranged.

Advance clips from The Bee Movie - it won't be ready for release until November - suggest that Seinfeld's unique and sophisticated humour could open up animation to a whole new audience. "What I like about animation is that it's the only medium where there's nothing you can think of that you can't do, " he tells me, climbing out of his costume. "You can be completely free with comedy."

He got the idea when he was doing a stand-up comedy show in Nashville. "I was eating a twizzler and joked, wouldn't it be funny to do a movie about bees call The Bee Movie, " he says.

A year later he called Steven Spielberg about directing a commercial. "We live in the same area on Long Island. Steven said that he didn't do commercials but suggested that I come over with my wife for dinner. So we did. At one point, running out of anything to say I broke the silence by repeating the joke.

Steven got excited and called Jeffrey Katzenberg on his cellphone. Steven, I said, it's just a pun. And now here I am four years later dressed up as a bee, all because of a lull in a conversation."

Seinfeld, who become an icon comic figure in 1990s American television playing a deadpan fictional version of himself in the long-running sitcom Seinfeld ("a show about nothing"), turned down a record $5m per episode to film a tenth season, preferring instead to return to live comedy.

When reruns were sold into syndication he made $250m.

Seinfeld has made a series of vignettes about the making of The Bee Movie that are being screened on NBC. In one of them a story conference chaired by Seinfeld is interrupted by a coffee boy, who chips in with some ideas of his own. Seinfeld tells him off. He leaves the room, chastened. It turns out that he was Spielberg's son. The next shot shows Seinfeld bringing the coffee, with the kid now in charge of the conference.