Gerwig is brimming with references and influences, many of which she organizes to make the film “genuinely artificial,” all of which are “fake, but TRUE “Fake” — pretend play, but tangible and tactile, like playing with a real toy. She called “The Truman Show” director Peter Weir and asked how to “express something that is both artificial and emotional at the same time.” She’s tried channeling musicals like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Singing in the Rain,” but she says the same goes for them. Many of the special effects are based on her analogue techniques from 1959, the year chosen because it was the year Barbie dolls debuted. The mermaid Barbie doll we see splashes behind a wave of Jeff Koons-esque plastic, hoisted by a seesaw-like rig. The blue expanse floating above Barbie Land isn’t a green screen. It is the vast background of the drawn sky.
“Barbie” has a larger scope, budget and potential audience than Gerwig’s previous work. This was part of its charm. Gerwig has intentionally grown in scale. Yet she continues to focus on her characters taking baby steps into adulthood. (Her next project is The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix.) The main characters she played in her collaborations with Baumbach, Frances Ha and Mistress America, are probably the big names in the Barbie IP. You would make a big statement about hits, and so did they. To understand who they are. So did the heroines of Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, loosely inspired by her own childhood in Sacramento, a sequel based on one of her favorite childhood books. It was the same with “Wakakusa Monogatari”.
“Barbie” is also a coming-of-age story. It’s just that the adult figure happened to be a lump of plastic that grew. “Wakakusa Monogatari” would have been a great alternative title. The same goes for Lady Bird’s working title, Mothers and Daughters. As with both other films, for Barbie, growing up is a matter of matriarchy. It’s something you do with your mother, sisters, and aunts. Or, in the case of Barbie dolls, women appear in the history of the product.
at first, There was Ruth Handler, who had eavesdropped on her daughter Barbara playing with a paper doll. Little Barbie His handler and his friends imagined their careers and personalities while dressing the cutouts in different outfits. Her mother’s very feminist insight was that there are no three-dimensional dolls that allow girls to explore becoming adult women, only baby dolls that encourage them to practice motherhood.
Handler and her husband, Elliot, already ran Mattel, a toy company they founded in a California garage in 1945. It’s run by Handler, and he invented the toys. Her proposal for a non-baby doll stalled until she found a potential prototype while traveling in Switzerland. The Bild Lilli was a novelty toy modeled after the blond lioness from West German cartoons that could be used as a car accessory for grown-up men, much like mud flaps in the Playboy silhouette. Handler brought home some as her proof of concept. Manufacturers, retailers, and even Mattel weren’t sure if a mother would buy such a Bubba Bubba doll toy for her daughter, but the company was informed by a well-known Freudian marketing consultant that Barbie It was advised that the mother might be incapacitated if she thought the doll was teaching properly. polite. They may not like her precociousness, but they will put up with her models to bring femininity to the mainstream.
