Barbie (film)

The first-live action adaptation (and the first theatrically-released film in the franchise for that matter; all of the prior entries were released straight to video) of the popular toy line, the 2023 Barbie film is more of a satirical comedy revolving around the titular doll character and Mattel itself instead of the usual fairy tale/princess fare or the Dreamhouse continuity. The film is directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig alongside Noah Baumbach, while Margot Robbie produces and stars as the main Barbie. Also producing is David Heyman.

The story centers around a typical Barbie (Robbie) living in an utopian toyland populated by Barbie and Ken dolls called "Barbieland". When a series of unusual incidents in her otherwise perfect life led her to ruminate about her existence, she and her friend Ken (Ryan Gosling) travel to the real world in search for answers, all while being hounded by Mattel's corporate management who catches wind of their presence and seek to put her back in a box.

Tropes used in Barbie (film) include:

Artistic License Geography: The map of the world as seen in the film is more reflective of a child's drawing than a real-world map.
Artistic License History: While the film portrays Ruth Handler as having had trouble with the IRS, in reality Mrs. Handler was charged with financial fraud with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Baby Got Back: Like it or not, the heroine's behind does seem to stand out a lot.
Barbie Doll Anatomy: For the obvious reason. Quite a lot of humor is made on this.
Become a Real Woman: Barbie is granted her wish to become human after having expressed her sentiments to her creator.
Biting the Hand Humor: The film makes light of Mattel's less-than-stellar moments, particularly with Ruth Handler's white-collar criminal record.
Breast Expansion: Growing Up Skipper was also a Barbieland resident, whose front end can be expanded upon rotating her left arm through an internal mechanism. And it was a real product.
The Cameo: John Cena as a Kenmaid. He only has a few seconds of screen time as a background character at best.
Camp: Done in spades a la Aqua's "Barbie Girl".
Cool Car: Barbie's pink 1956 C1 Corvette and Ken's Hummer EV. The 'Vette is actually a replica made to run on an electric motor, scaled down by 25% and decked with plastic decals for instruments in keeping with the toy aesthetic (the Forza Horizon 5 DLC released to tie in with the film even has a little Easter Egg with the faux odometer reading "031959" in reference to the year the Barbie franchise was launched).
Cool Old Lady: Ruth Handler, definitely. Truly the Only Sane Person in the cast, the Big Good of the story and a Granny Classic that everyone can relate to.
Corrupt Corporate Executive: Largely averted with the Mattel suits, though there are still some shades of it in some way.
Crap Saccharine World: Barbieland may seem sunshine and pink at first, but cracks in the system become more apparent later in the film as the Kens revolt and introduce patriarchy to their realm after being treated as second-class citizens.
Darker and Edgier: Despite all the merchandise aimed for kids and the seemingly juvenile premise, the film takes on a decidedly more mature tone as a deconstruction of the franchise and adult topics which children may not easily grasp such as existentialism, masculinity and womanhood.
Deconstructive Parody: The film self-deprecatingly mocks and apes the franchise's controversial history where detractors of the line criticise it for presenting girls with unrealistic and idealised grown-up fantasies, as well as Barbie and Ken's lack of genitalia.
Dead All Along: Ruth, which makes a lot of sense, seeing as the real one died in 2002. The Mattel CEO mentioned that he knew the ghost of Barbie's inventor is living in their corporate headquarters - he couldn't exactly ask her to leave.
Easily Forgiven: Despite having committed high treason, the Kens are let off with a slap in the wrist; they are also given an opportunity to have at least somewhat of a voice in Barbieland's affairs.
Enemy Civil War: Barbie and her allies trick the Kens into fighting with each other, giving them an opportunity to retake their government.
Everybody Owns a Chevy: General Motors cars are used exclusively in both Barbieland and the real world.
Fantastic Racism: The Kens are merely looked upon by the ruling Barbies as accessories to them, and even worse so with the rejected controversial dolls (e.g. Midge, Sugar Daddy and Earring Kens, Growing-Up Skipper and Weird Barbie) who are viewed with some disdain as second-class citizens.
FBI Agent: An agent from the Feds alerts Mattel about the incident where Barbie and Ken venture into the real world. The Mattel staff later recalled an incident where Skipper escaped from Barbieland and moonlighted as a babysitter.
Flat Character: Sort of an in-universe example. The protagonist is one of hundreds of Barbies, and seems to be the most generic of all of them. Despite this - or maybe because of it - she is the one who starts to gain a sense of Medium Awareness.
Getting Crap Past the Radar: Not counting the numerous jokes about the heroine's lack of genitals... The Mattel execs try to put Barbie in a human-sized display box, and she almost complies - yeah, nothing risque about that, right?
Golem: Barbie, at least in some way considering how Ruth Handler is Jewish and how she imbued her creation with all her hopes and dreams for girls who play with her.
Good All Along: The Mattel CEO is rude, condescending, arrogant, and generally hard to work for, but he cares more about making children happy than simply making money. He comes off as malicious, but turns out to be misguided.
I Choose to Stay: At the end of the movie, Barbie chooses to stay in the real world, believing having all the downsides associated with being human (including negative emotions and morality) are preferable to living the same day ad infinitum, no matter how happy it may seem.
I Know Madden Kombat: Deconstructed. The Kens choose sports equipment as their Weapon of Choice when the Barbies trick them into fighting each other, but their attempts to do so are... ridiculous. Still, there's a benefit to this - no injuries.
I Was Quite a Looker: Weird Barbie was originally a typical Barbie, until a naughty girl "played too hard" with her doll equivalent and broke it. This sort of link to the real world is the same reason Stereotypical Barbie is starting to have bouts of depression and self-doubt.
Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The Mattel Execs border on Team Rocket's level of competence in many scenes, their attempts to capture Barbie best described as ridiculous. The reason she escapes at first happens when she asks to use the rest room - they let her, and it takes a minute or two for it to sink in that she doesn't intend to come back. When they actually chase after her, there's a scene where Barbie flees from them by jumping over a turnstyle, which to them is an impenetrable barrier because they don’t have their keycards; rather makes you wonder just who the naive fish-out-of-water is here.
Innocent Fanservice Girl: Take a wild guess. Barbie is eternally innocent and completely naive, not catching onto the meaning of fanservice until a lout indecently slaps her. Of course, her reaction - she punches his lights out - shows she can be a quick learner.
Intimidating Revenue Service: Ruth Handler makes light of how the IRS screwed her over (in actuality, it was her issues with alleged financial falsification that got her into trouble with the SEC, not the IRS; it's likely that the writers changed her criminal record in the film as tax evasion is something most audiences are more familiar with).
Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Weird Barbie is an outcast in Barbieland simply because she is, well, weird and unattractive, despite being a sort of oracle who is more than willing to help the protagonist. Unlike most examples of this Trope, it ends happily, with the the heroine convincing the other Barbies to apologize and accept her back.
Loophole Abuse: Fortunately, Sasha does not need a license to drive a toy car.
Mary Suetopia: Barbieland starts off this way, later qualifies as more of a Parody Suetopia
Medium Aware: The plot, in a nutshell. Barbie malfunctions, realizes she isn't perfect, decides to find her origins, leading her to the real world - and then trying to understand what she finds. Unfortunately for her, there's a lot of folks who want her to stay in her "box"...
Merchandise-Driven: Both played straight and lampshaded. While Mattel's merchandising intentions for the film is, part and parcel, the film did explore and satirise the ins and outs of merchandise-driven blockbusters (e.g. the Michael Bay-produced Transformers series) like when how the Kendom takeover resulted in the move towards producing a film based on Ken.
Mythology Gag:
- Many of the outfits and playsets featured in the film were actual products Mattel sold previously. Some of the most notorious were the aforementioned Skipper, the pregnant Midge doll, the Sugar Daddy and Earring Kens (also known by collectors as "Gay" or "Fey" Ken), and the Video Girl Barbie, whose release in 2010 sparked a moral panic from parents and law enforcement amid fears that the doll's camera feature could be used by pedophiles to film illicit footage of children.
- Filipino movie-goers may recognise the Filipiniana gown Ana Cruz Kayne's Barbie character wore in the film as a nod to Kayne's Filipino heritage. In the mid-1970s, Mattel opened plants in the Philippines in a bid to diversify production lines and cut costs following Ferdinand Marcos's spearheading of the Export Processing Zone project. While the "Pinoy Barbie" dolls were short-lived due to setbacks, Mattel later produced a series of dolls honouring the Philippines and its culture.
Narrator: Helen Mirren narrates the film.
Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In their efforts to nab Barbie, the suits inadvertently chase her into a room where she meets none other than her creator (and up to now, the one person she can trust), Ruth Handler. Things start looking up for Barbie from then on, and it likely wouldn't have happened had she not had to run and hide.
Parody Sue: Barbie herself. The film seems intent on portraying Barbie as a satire of herself while still making her likable.
Perfection Is Impossible: Barbie realizing this is what jump-starts the main plot.
Pink Is Girly: It's the dominant color in Barbieland, and all of the heroine's clothes have at least some of it.
Planet of Steves: Nearly all of Barbieland's inhabitants are named Barbie or Ken, with a few exceptions like Allan, Midge and Skipper.
Pragmatic Villainy: At the end of the movie, the Mattel CEO think's Gloria's "Ordinary Barbie" idea is "terrible", but he decides to produce it anyway after another exec tells him it would definitely make a profit.
Precision F-Strike: When the Kens confront the newly-liberated Barbies who retook their Dreamhouses, wondering aloud as to why they became "a whole lot dreamier", President Barbie bluntly replied, saying "that's because they're Dreamhouses, motherfucker!". Being it's a PG film, President Barbie's cuss was bleeped out and her mouth obscured with the Mattel logo.
Product Placement: Besides the fairly obvious, a number of General Motors cars were prominently featured such as the above-mentioned Corvette and Hummer models.
Red Pill, Blue Pill: In an obvious nod to The Matrix (which was also produced by Warner Bros.), Barbie is given a choice between staying in her home world or going to the real world to find out the truth, represented by a pink high heel and a Birkenstock sandal respectively. Barbie, now going by the name "Barbara Handler", wears a pair of Birkenstocks by the end of the movie.
Retraux: The film's logo is from the 70s-80s era Barbie logo.
Self Deprecating Humor: First of all, the bad guys in this movie are a fictitious version of Mattel. The plot has quite a lot of humor that is aimed at mocking the concept of Barbie and how she might have harmed popular culture - while at the same time focusing on how she might fix it.
Sissy Villain: Both the Mattel Execs and the Kens come off as this, and in the latter case, not even a plague of Testosterone Poisoning fully changes this.
Sugar Bowl: Barbieland is (ostensibly) portrayed as a cheery female-led utopia.
Testosterone Poisoning: Ken picks this up bad in the real world, and it becomes contagious when he returns to Barbieland, turning the other Kens into misogynistic jerks and turning the Barbies subservient. Gloria goes so far as to compare this to the 15th Century smallpox outbreak in the Americas, stating that it spreads fast because none of the residents have any immunity to it.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: Barbie gets a verbal beat-down by Gloria's daughter Sasha, who blamed the doll line for degrading young girls and espousing consumerism.
Toy Time: Barbieland is portrayed as a life-size toyland utopia inhabited by dolls.
Tulpa: Barbieland is basically a world constructed out of childish imagination, each Barbie a representation of the real-world toys. When one Barbie's owner starts becoming depressed and drawing fanart of Barbie dreading iminent death and gaining weight, the one in Barbieland "malfuctions" and starts having the same negative feelings, leading to her desire to discover the truth.