Barbie takes a ride from her dream house to reality as Little Women writer-director Greta Gerwig takes another cultural icon and lovingly subverts itWriter-director Greta Gerwig’s cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s most (in)famous toy comes on like a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy Story 2, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the cult live-action feature Josie and the Pussycats and the Roger Ebert-scripted exploitation romp Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject.
Audiences will be delighted.
Mattel should be ecstatic.After a heavily trailered 2001-parody opening, we move to a pastel pink haven in which, “thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved”.
This is Barbieland – a fantasy world in which big-haired dolls can be anything, thereby inspiring equivalent feminine achievement out there in…
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