Barbie 2023: A Tour De Force

 Earning over $775 million globally, Barbie is one of the highest-grossing films of the year. A doll is an 11-inch tall plastic doll, having the figure of an adult woman was introduced to the world on March 9^th, 1959 by Mattel Inc. a southern California toy company. Ruth Handler was the co-founder along with her husband- Elliot. Barbie has indeed paved the way for the best-selling toy- with over a billion dolls sold to date. Her male counterpart Ken Carson (Kenneth Sean) was introduced two years later and met Barbie on a TV commercial set. 

 

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Barbie | Main Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBk4NYhWNMM

Directed by Greta Gerwig the screenplay was written with Noah Baumbach. It is the first live-action Barbie film after many computer-animated television films. A simultaneous release with Oppenheimer on July 21^st led to the Barbenheimer phenomenon on social media, also encouraging people to watch both films! The film follows the lives of stereotypical Barbie and all the lives of other 

 

Barbies who live in ‘Barbie land’ which is a matriarchal society women are very confident, self-sufficient and successful. While the Ken counterparts spend their days engaging in recreational activities at the beach, all the Babies hold important jobs such as doctors, lawyers and politicians. However, there is one Ken who is only happy when he sees (the main) Barbie. 

However, he is constantly rebuffed by her as Barbie only seeks independence and female friendships. However, Barbie suddenly starts to get worried about mortality during a dance party and finds that she can no longer live her routine life. 

The next day she also finds that her feet have become flat and she has cellulite! This forces her to pay a visit to a wise but disfigured outcast- Weird Barbie, who tells her that in order to cure her affliction she must travel to the real world and find the child who has been playing with her. 

 

While Barbie sets off to the real world, to find the human who is ‘playing’ with her, Ken sneaks into the backseat of the car on their way to the real world. 

On reaching the real world, Barbie tracks down her owner, a teen girl Sasha who criticises her for encouraging unrealistic beauty standards. She also finds Gloria – Sasha’s mother who had begun to play with Sasha’s old Barbie dolls when she had experienced an existential crisis. Gloria also happens to work for Mattel. When Ken reaches the real world he discovers the society to be very patriarchal and feels very respected and accepted. 

Far from the utopian society that she is expecting, the real world is full of problems and is not at all what she expected the world to be like. She is very dismayed to hear that the young girl Sasha hates Barbies and does not even play with them. She is met with the harsh reality that the Barbie doll has not revolutionised the world and that women are having a hard time in comparison to men. Ken realises that 

 

 As Barbie and Ken are on their way back to Barbie's land, the mother-daughter duo, Sasha and Gloria, the Mattel CEO and other high-ranking executives also travel back with them.

I'm Just Ken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1IgAEejvqM

 

 After visiting the real world, Ken decides to transform Barbie land into a male-dominated area known as ‘Kendom’ destroying feminism, wearing Stallone-inspired fur coats and riding horses decides to change Barbie-land into what he dubs his Mojo Dojo Casa House. He is far more interested in playing war games with the other Kens instead of pursuing his crush on Barbie.   

 

When they arrive back in Barbie Land, they see that Barbie Land has now turned into ‘Ken Land’ and they need to restore power back to all the Barbies. Sasha’s mom who is also a Barbie fan gives all the Barbies a speech which touches them, but however stereotypical Barbie decides that she belongs in the real world.   

 

With Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling snagging the roles as stereotypical Barbie and (Beach) Ken, many other actors as Kate Mckinnon as weird Barbie, Issa Rae as President Barbie, Simu Liu as Tourist Ken,  as Stereotypical Ken and many other prominent personalities playing other versions of Barbie and Ken the film is a very self-empowering and feministic movie.  

 

The movie takes you on an interesting twist of events encountering the movie is a very self-empowering and feministic movie. What really makes this film so interesting to the audience is that there is a series of difficult decisions which Barbie has to make which are so relatable to all of us; decisions where she has to choose between something extremely familiar and something unknown.