After watching and mostly enjoying the recent rash of Barbie movies based on different legends and fairy tales, I was curious to see “The Barbie Diaries.” I’m sorry to say that I was disappointed.
To begin with, the animation was odd. Barbie looked nothing like the Barbie we’ve come to expect in the other films, and all the characters looked too real, as though we were trying to break through that Barbie mentality and see them as being real people. But that didn’t work either, because the details were missing. It was more realistic, and yet it wasn’t.
The storyline has been done to death. Barbie and her friends aren’t popular, but they want to be. The popular kids are mean and heartless, and torment everyone around them who is not popular. It is the aim of all the nerds to be cool, and the aim of the cool to keep away from the nerds. In the middle of this, Barbie gets a crush on a popular boy, Todd (not Ken! Where’s Ken when you need him?) who is the boyfriend of Barbie’s arch rival, Raquel. When Todd shows interest in Barbie, it only serves to make Raquel angry, and she torments Barbie even more.
Barbie wants to be the anchor for the high school’s news show, and decides that in order to win that spot, she’ll do an in-depth report on what it takes to be cool. What she discovers is that the cool girls spend their time back-biting and spreading rumors, and that’s not the kind of person she wants to be. She has to give up what she wants in order to be true to her friends. However, in the end, she gets everything she wants.
Barbie has always stood for girl power, as an emblem for everything girls should aspire to be. She can have any career, she can stay home if she wants, she can be educated – there is a Barbie for every goal. Barbie is a symbol of hope for girls. It disturbed me to see her so easily led into doing things she knew were wrong because of her desire to be popular. Barbie knows better.
The Barbie of the movie was too hung-up on her feelings for Todd, and her sense of self-worth was diminished when he broke their date. Barbie as we’ve always known her has a self-esteem that is not dependent on anyone else. She knows who she is, and a broken date will not crush her. It will disappoint her, but she’ll move forward, having filled her life with purpose and meaning. Todd wasn’t even worth Barbie’s time. His whole focus was himself and sports. The Barbie I know looks for a guy who has more going on upstairs.
I also disliked the premise that if you’re popular, you got that way by being mean. I have known plenty of girls who were popular but weren’t catty.
For these reasons, I didn’t feel that the character in the movie was consistent with Barbie, the icon. I don’t want my daughter using the movie Barbie as her role model; I want her to feel that her worth comes from the inside, not whether a boy asks her to the dance. Couple that with the bad animation, and I wasn’t impressed with the film. My 10-year-old daughter enjoyed it, but that’s as far as it went in our family.
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