Did Dreamworks actually ask permission to use them here, or not (considering what ended up causing Dreamworks to be formed?)?
On another note, this movie's so-so, the plot's contrived, Seinfeld is better on his own show, and I feel bad for Ken, considering how horrible his girlfriend (forgot her name) is to him.
They're just parodies of those characters. They make them look as similar as possible without infringing any copyright and also not using their names but making it obvious what they're supposed to be referencing. Lots of movies do this to poke fun at other movies.
shareI worked at Dreamworks Animation from 2006 to 2017. They were deathly afraid of being sued for any reason. We'd get new hires who were ex-Disney, ex-Pixar, ex-Sony, all the other major studios, and they were always flabbergasted by how many legal hoops Bus Affairs made everyone in production jump through to get anything done. Countless times I heard them say things like "Holy shit, you guys are paranoid. It was never this hard at Disney," or wherever. Just getting a lousy font approved for a sign in the background could take weeks, if it got approved at all. When times were good they had plenty of cash to buy licensing for pretty much anything they wanted to use. Bee Movie was in production when the company was pretty much at its peak of success, so...
sharePooh and Piglet were created by A. A. Milne in the 1920s, long before Disney ever obtained licensing of the characters.
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