I had intended on writing a blog post back in August when I first watched the movie but better late than never!
When I first heard there was going to be a live-action Barbie movie I had mixed feelings. My initial thoughts were that it will either be an absolute train wreck or if it's done right, really impactful and satirical. I'm happy that it was the latter. I wasn’t really a Barbie girl growing up, or at least not for long. I remember getting a Rapunzel Barbie doll for Christmas one year, she had really long hair and you could make her hair even longer, probably by pulling her arm or something! I did a bit of googling and found her, the 2002 Barbie as Rapunzel Doll. I also recently found a photo of me on Christmas morning and you can see lots of Barbie paraphernalia in the background of the photo! Once I discovered Bratz I never looked back, but Barbie is iconic in her own right.
During a concerning rise in incel culture online in recent years thanks to people like Andrew Tate, it was refreshing to see a movie like Barbie come to life in a way that was progressive, bright and fun. The girlies deserved this! (As well as members of the LGBTQI community and anyone else Barbie resonated with). Clearly there is demand for this type of movie. It was a box office hit, bringing in over a billion dollars, making it the highest grossing movie of 2023 and the highest grossing movie by a solo female director. I loved that going to see Barbie became such a huge event in pop culture. As far as I'm aware, no single person announced "Hey, let's wear pink to see Barbie!" it just happened. Suddenly, the cinemas were full of people of all ages wearing head to toe pink. I hadn't felt such a sense of collective excitement to see a film in years. The memes just created themselves too, Barbenheimer was hilarious and it definitely created more hype around both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Margot Robbie plays 'Stereotypical Barbie' which is described as: "the Barbie you think of when someone says, "Think of a Barbie!". At the beginning of the film, Helen Mirren narrates. She describes how little girls used to play with baby dolls because that was really all that was available to them. They could only play at being mothers, but then came Barbie, a fashion doll. The groundbreaking thing about Barbie is that she can do anything. Even at a time when women couldn't open a bank account without a man's permission. Astonishingly, this was still the case in the US until 1974, before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. In the UK, women weren't given this basic right until a year later in 1975! Barbie on the other hand had her own house, her own car and she made her own money, whether that was as an astronaut, construction worker or surgeon. Anything is possible for Barbie, and Mattel wants to sell this idea that Barbie believes possibilities are limitless for kids too. Barbie's slogan is: "You Can Be Anything". Ken has always been seen more as an accessory to Barbie, he was first introduced in 1961. In the movie, she describes him as "totally superfluous". He is desperate for her attention, and his love for her sadly isn't reciprocated. The Kens don't really have a real sense of purpose in Barbie Land, even where they live is a mystery! Ken's job is "Beach" and his priority is Barbie. As they say in the movie, she has a great day every day, he has a great day when she looks in his direction.
Barbie and a few of her many careers
When we first meet Stereotypical Barbie, we see that everything in her life is perfect. She wakes up feeling refreshed and happy, waves to her friends, goes for a shower and the temperature is perfect (there is no water in Barbie Land), and then floats down from her dreamhouse to her car, because when you play with Barbies as a child, you usually don't take the effort or time to walk your doll all the way down the stairs to her car, you just put her straight in the car and off she goes. Everything starts to change when she's partying with the other Barbies and suddenly asks "Do you guys ever think about dying?" the music stops, she looks like a deer in headlights and everyone looks at her horrified. She goes to bed feeling unsettled, wondering what could have possibly caused her to think of death. The next day, she wakes up with morning breath, her shower is cold, and instead of floating gracefully off her roof like she normally does, she falls from it.
I love how Greta Gerwig incorporated so many aspects that reflected how we actually played with toys when we were younger, with characters like 'Weird Barbie' played by Kate McKinnon, who I thought was great. 'Weird Barbie' is a Barbie that you play with too hard and she ends up with strange hair, strange clothes, pen all over her face and her long blonde hair has been hacked off with scissors. She's usually found sitting in the corner of your bedroom in the splits. The character reminded me of the Barbie that appears at the end of Toy Story 2. I never purposefully ruined any of my Bratz, the thought of them having pen on their face or sticky hair filled me with absolute horror, but I did have a habit of giving some of them haircuts from time to time. Sometimes I would cut their hair too short by accident and then I would be distraught. Margot Robbie said in an interview that Greta compared Barbie's permanently tiptoed feet to the bat-signal in Batman, an iconic symbol that you immediately recognise. When Stereotypical Barbie starts to malfunction, her feet become flat. When she asks the other Barbies for advice they tell her she has to visit Weird Barbie, much to her dismay. When she see her walking up to Weird Barbie's house she says "I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped this way!" which I thought was a funny line, it shows the "beauty is pain" mentality we have, where women's fashion in particular often prioritises appearance over functionality and comfort. Weird Barbie breaks the news to Stereotypical Barbie that she needs to find the girl who's playing with her in the real world, and if she doesn't, things will keep getting weirder for her in Barbie Land. By weirder, she means Barbie's cellulite will start to spread, and she'll "start getting sad and mushy and complicated".
The marketing for this film was next level. It’s been reported that Warner Bros. spent $150 million on the marketing campaign. In early 2023, promotional posters of the film started coming out, introducing the main characters with taglines such as “There’s only one Allan.” which had everyone pondering, who is Allan? Turns out he's Ken's best buddy, all Ken's clothes fit him! The internet did what it does best and started making memes in the same format for other iconic movie and TV characters.
Some of my personal favs
Burger King and the US ice cream brand Cold Stone Creamery collaborated with Barbie. When I was on holiday, restaurants were doing Barbie themed cocktails. Shops were suddenly full of pink clothing. Everyone was cashing in. I wouldn't be surprised if there's lots of Marketing students out there writing dissertations about the strategies used for this movie. The cast went on a promotional tour across the world, stopping at destinations like Seoul, Sydney and Mexico City. Margot Robbie’s outfits took a lot of inspiration from real Barbie dolls which I thought was so cool. There were even Barbies made inspired by the looks in the film. The global press tour was cut short by the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA strike.
I absolutely loved the set design, it was one of my favourite things about the whole film. I thought it was so cool that the dream houses really looked like real-life replicas of the toy versions, you could see right into them. Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer have 6 Oscar nominations for their work on Barbie (well deserved). If you haven't seen it already, the Architectural Digest video of the dreamhouse is really worth a watch! The actors talked about how being on a set like this really helped them to feel more immersed in Barbie Land. Weird Barbie's house is like a breath of fresh air, the structure of it is in stark contrast to the Barbie dreamhouses. It's made up of geometric shapes and the colour palette is different from the houses in Barbie Land. I thought it was so funny that they used a perfect replica of this discontinued Labrador called Tanner that defecates as he walks 😅
I thought the casting was great too. I saw some people online complaining that Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie were "too old" to play Barbie and Ken which is ridiculous, bear in mind that THE actual Barbie was born in March 1959! She's a doll, she's immortal, and made of plastic. I thought Margot was great, she brought a sensitivity to the role that it really needed, and Ryan was so funny. I think he's the funniest character in the whole film, so many good quotes. I haven't really seen him in a comedic role before, he's really good at it!
I loooove this sequence, the camping scene in particular 🌷
The power of Barbie Land is real, I got so immersed into it that I started to forget what it's like in our world. In Barbie Land, women hold all positions of power, the Supreme Court is entirely made up of women and the President is a woman. Once Barbie and Ken enter the real world, Barbie soon discovers:
The real world is forever and irrevocably messed up!
While Barbie tries to find the girl who's been playing with her, she sees an old woman for the first time. The woman in question is actually played by a woman called Ann Roth, an Oscar winning costume designer. Barbie tells her she's beautiful, and she replies "I know it". Greta Gerwig talked about how she was told that this scene wasn't needed, and the story would carry on just fine without it, but she argued that "if I cut that, I don’t know why I’m making this film’". It's a really wholesome scene because Barbie has never been exposed to ideas about losing your beauty and youth due from aging. It made me tear up in the cinema. A lot of the time, women are criticised when they start to look older, whereas men are often referred to as "silver foxes". CNN reporter Don Lemon was criticised after saying a 51-year old woman was past her prime: "When a woman is considered to be in her prime, is in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s."
"Did you bring your rollerblades?"
"I literally go nowhere without them!"
Ken wanders off on his own and discovers the patriarchy, which he thinks is where men and horses rule the world. He goes back to Barbie Land and spreads the word. Barbie meets Gloria, a burnt out mother of a daughter called Sasha who resents her. She's been playing with Barbies to try to recapture some joy from the past, causing the rift in the space-time continuum between Barbie Land and reality. Barbie brings Gloria and Sasha back to Barbie Land and can't wait to show them how incredible it is, but once they arrive things immediately feel off. The Barbies have been brainwashed after learning the ways of the patriarchy are wearing maid outfits serving the Kens "brewski beers" and giving foot massages. The Kens have taken over the dreamhouses with horse themed decor and mini fridges and rebranded them as "mojo dojo casa houses".
Stereotypical Barbie is immune from the brainwashing as she has been exposed to the real world, as has Allan. The 'New Depression Barbie' segment was so funny: "She wears sweatpants all day and night. She spent seven hours today on Instagram looking at her estranged best friend's engagement photos while eating a family bag of Starbursts, and now her jaw's killing her! And she's going to watch the BBC's Pride and Prejudice for the seventh time until she falls asleep!" After a brief mental breakdown and a pep talk from Gloria about the ridiculous unrealistic standards set for women, they hatch a plan to undo the damage that has been done by the growing 'Kendom'. Barbie comes to realise that in the past she mistreated Ken, and tells him that not every night had to be girls' night. She tells him that he has to find his sense of identity, he is his own person. In no way is the Barbie movie claiming that the better alternative to the patriarchy is a matriarchy, it explores the effect the mistreatment of the Kens has and Barbie's recognition of that.
Overall, I just love that they didn’t cut corners with this film, they really went all out. It was the right blend of funny, sad, sentimental and empowering.
The fashion in the film was amazing, and so were Margot's outfits on the press tour! These are just a few of my fav looks of hers 💗💗💗
Honestly it's a crime that all the shoes are cropped out, sue me
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! 💓
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