Astand-up has to morph to survive," said Jerry Seinfeld, sitting in his nondescript office on the Dream Works campus in Glendale, Calif., in mid-October. "You can't just do the one thing. Unless you're really a mad genius like, maybe -- I think even (George) Carlin got frustrated after a while. Even Rodney (Dangerfield) morphed, he became a movie star, you knowfi You gotta get out there in some other formulas, just to keep the audience interested in you, to give the career some texture and some depth. And you should be able to."

The night before, Seinfeld -- who at 53 still looks uncannily just like Seinfeld, save for the slow receding of his hairline -- had watched his heavily promoted "Bee Movie" in a major Los Angeles film house, where it was screened for an audience made up of Dream Works staff and their various plus-ones.

"My wife said that she doesn't remember the last time she heard laughs like that in a movie theater," Seinfeld said. "I said, 'Well, "Knocked Up" got great laughs.' But that has sexual edge and profanity, so it's not really the same sport. It's a different sport. This is a family movie, you can take your grandmother and your 4-year-old."

It's a bit disconcerting, you suppose, to hear Seinfeld talking like P.T. Barnum about fun for the whole family. On "Seinfeld," the unsentimental, anti-sitcom edict was "No hugging, no learning." The sitcom was a celebration of anti social behavior -- witty, cynical and totally opposed to the idea that the audience wants to see characters grow.

A decade after he closed the book on his mega hit, Seinfeld is a father of three, still first and foremost a working stand-up but now the voice of a cartoon character, the bee Barry B. Benson, who in "Bee Movie" leaves the hive and learns valuable lessons.

What's thisfi He growsfi If, as Seinfeld says, all comedians have to morph, has he chosen to morph into a plush toyfi

Seinfeld doesn't think so. Nor does he regard "Bee Movie," which lands in theaters Friday, as something that could have come only from Seinfeld the dad.

"When I started doing this, we had a 2-year-old and a newborn, so I wasn't thinking, 'Hey, I gotta get some entertainment so these kids have something to do for an hour and a half four years from now.' "

In his act, Seinfeld has long been anthropomorphizing. "I like the fact that we're attempting to blame it on the cows," he said of mad cow disease on "Letterman" in 2001. " 'They are crazy. They are nuts. These cows are out of their minds.' Of course the cows are thinking, 'Oh, yeah, you're drinking me, you're wearing me, you're sneaking up on me and tipping me over. And I'm a little off mentallyfi' "

This is basically what "Bee Movie" is -- a Seinfeld-ian riff but about bees, with all the toys and imaginative expertise that DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg could offer him to illustrate their world, and Seinfeld's judgment on every aspect of the production.

But if Katzenberg offered a golden ticket into a Wonka world, Seinfeld still needed the confidence of a good premise. The plot of "Bee Movie" -- bee finds out humans are co-opting and selling honey behind the bee world's back -- is not totally unlike an episode from the last season of "Seinfeld" in which George argues that pigeons are breaking their social contract with humans by not getting out of his way.

"To me it's one of those Seinfeld-ian observations," said Fox late-night talk show host Spike Feresten, who wrote on "Seinfeld" and was one of three writers (along with Andy Robin, another ex-"Seinfeld" guy, and Barry Marder) whom Seinfeld brought in to write the first draft of the movie.

"That line about `We had a deal with the pigeons,' I remember Jerry coming up with that on [`Seinfeld'], the same way I remember his saying bees are the only ... insect species that humans have been profiting off of, and what if the bees found out about it and did something about it fi"

On "Seinfeld," the writing staff tended to split, with the inner sanctum of Larry and Jerry (co-creators Larry David and Seinfeld) and then everyone else.

"Doing a sitcom is like running in front of a locomotive," said Seinfeld , asked about the writers he assembled for "Bee Movie." "I never got to have lunch with everybody. I always envied them those lunches, you know. They'd talk sports and make fun of whatever's going on in the world. And I would usually either be working or napping. I would take a nap in the middle of the day. Every day of the show."

As a comedy, "Bee Movie" comes in at a lean 82 minutes, but it also sells something Seinfeld has never sold -- sentiment. And feelings. Barry the bee falls in love with a human; Seinfeld on "Seinfeld" never did (or quickly broke up over something petty, to avoid the intimacy).

The film, then, is on a continuum with "Finding Nemo" and "Antz" -- the tale of a nobody doomed to the same job for the rest of his life, who rebels against his place in the hierarchy, the moral of which is usually that individual choice trumps the complacency of the group.

"I need to get excited," Seinfeld said. "And this was exciting, because it was, like, you know, all new toys. All new controls. All new machine. And it was, like, 'Gee, I wonder if I could do thatfi' And if I could, it would feel totally different than what I have done. That's why, I think, Julia and Jason and Michael had difficulties, you know, because, well, we've kinda seen this."

"Julia and Jason and Michael," of course, are Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards, all of whom, post-"Seinfeld," attempted and failed, glaringly, to reimagine themselves in new sitcoms (although Louis-Dreyfus has found modest success with her CBS comedy, "The New Adventures of Old Christine," due back early next year).

Seinfeld, however, was at an advantage. "The act" was always his passion, and so the comic on the sitcom needed only to go back to being the comic in life, even if his stand-up could now seem like a billionaire's hobby.

"We are the ones who are winning this game in the end," he said of stand-up comics. "It's better that people look down on it. The comedians are the winners. We have a relationship with the audience (that actors) don't have. I will always have an audience. I can always work. It's better that they look down upon it as creatively inferior. ... It's kind of a Jewish thing, 'Let them not notice us, 'cause we're getting away with murder.' "

Seinfeld arrived in Los Angeles in 1980, a stand-up in his mid-20s dreaming of a spot on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show," and left, finally, in 1998 as one of the richest men in America.

During those 18 years, he says, he went into the ocean exactly once. He was a workaholic with various girlfriends who would put down roots when he got back to New York. L.A. was the scene of his king-making.

After the onslaught of "Bee Movie," there will still be the act. Seinfeld plans to get more focused on the act, to do more than Vegas (Nov. 16-17) and the odd date elsewhere (Nov. 9, a convention center in Lima, Ohio). It's the same Seinfeld, different observations -- i.e. why are terrorists always working out on the monkey bars in those training videosfi

He is asked about Carson, the icon, and the stoic way he exited "The Tonight Show" stage and, by extension, public life.

"I will never leave the way he did," Seinfeld said. "I will always perform if I can."

He tells of a dinner with Carson after his retirement, when Carson talked of how he intended to pattern himself after Cary Grant, who refused, in later life, to do "The Tonight Show " despite Carson's repeated pleas.

"We started this conversation talking about movies that are too long, and this is the same thing. It's the same self-indulgent virus ... 'They can't get enough of me, they can't.'

"They can," Seinfeld said, hitting the punch line. "And have."