Barbie’s Evolution: From Perfection To Anxious Teen
As a father of two girls, Barbie gets featured on our TV a lot; My family has probably checked off most of the doll’s catalog of films and shows. One thing that struck me while viewing this media is how much the image of Barbie has changed from being an ideal girl to a worrisome teen.
Early Films
Barbie’s first film Barbie in the Nutcracker set the standard for most of the following movies. Magic, princes, and other phantasmagorical elements are all present alongside uplifting messages on not giving up and chasing your dreams.
From 2001–2011, Barbie was primarily a princess, playing that part in 10 films, but she was also a type of fairy in 5 films, and a mermaid in a handful. Many featured magic, such as an enchanted mirror in Barbie & The Diamond Castle or a magic paintbrush in Barbie as Rapunzel, as some sort of plot device.
In this era, Barbie is always presented as beautiful and resourceful. She’s able to solve any problem and look fabulous simultaneously, mimicking the play of the Barbie doll.
In this way, Barbie is an aspirational character, meant to be someone for children to look up to and almost like a superhero. She was an ideal, completely perfect, and unattainable.
However, this image wouldn’t last as the films began to branch out and the shows became more self-aware.
Life In The Dreamhouse
Staring in 2012, Barbie began to slowly break out of the princess role. The character began dipping her toes in more realistic, albeit still fantastic, careers in Barbie: The Princess & The Popstar.
While she was still a princess in this film, she switched places with a musical artist to escape the stuffiness of royal life. This story arc escaping royal life or adopting a role outside of princess occurs frequently in these films.
For example, in Barbie: Rock ‘N Royals she begins as a princess who accidentally goes to a rockstar camp where she becomes a musician, and in Barbie in Princess Power, she goes from princess to super hero after being kissed by a magic butterfly.
These films seem to acknowledge that Barbie can be more than a princess and are more aware of how the doll and the character have been presented. This self-awareness reaches an extreme through the web show Barbie: Life In The Dreamhouse.
The show plays with the Barbie doll having so many careers. A running gag is Skipper going “but weren’t you a (insert career)” whenever a problem comes forth to which Barbie always replies yes and proceeds to put on the job’s uniform.
By highlighting the absurdity of Barbie’s perfection and ability to do anything, the show creates marvelous humor.
This absurdity gets truly highlighted when Barbie’s friends and sisters attempt to uncover her age during her birthday party. They note how she’s been president, so she has to be a certain age for that, but she’s also been a doctor, so she must have had the many years of medical school as well.
The episode cuts away before the audience hears her true age, but that having all these careers would take an immense amount of time and training makes this episode extremely hilarious. Even with this awareness from the films and shows, the studio seems to have realized that Barbie still wasn’t quite relatable, and that’s when the world got Barbie: Dreamhouse Adventures.
Barbie As An Anxious Millennial
While the films accepted Barbie’s superb abilities as being an ideal, and then later a base for satire, Barbie: Dreamhouse Adventures tackles how a teenage Barbie would act should she be that talented. This show frames the character as a multitalented overachiever, but she’s not flawless by any means.
This iteration of Barbie has problems letting go and allowing others to fail. It’s not that she’s a control freak, just extremely empathetic and wants no one to fail. She places the problems of everyone on her shoulders.
In one episode, Skipper gets her first babysitting gig, and since Barbie is the supposed super sitter, she asks Barbie for help preparing for the task. While Barbie is away watching a movie in the park with her friends, she keeps imagining scenarios of Skipper losing control of the children and sneaks back to the house to check on Skipper.
In another, she agrees to let Chelsea go with their father on the annual meteor shower watch, which Barbie has done since she was little. After her Dad and Chelsea leave, she regrets missing out on the tradition and uses a mixed-up pizza order as an excuse to go and sneakily watch the shower.
Barbie also has problems asking for help. One instance of this is when Skipper and Stacy can’t remake Barbie’s cake after destroying it and Barbie can’t seem to get her robotics project to work. The sisters have to exchange each other’s expertise so that both of their problems can be solved.
These types of flaws work for the character because they seem like natural extensions of being an overachiever. Barbie is good at so many things, but she worries too much about the failures of herself and others. What results is a character that is aspirational, but also relatable.
Barbie’s transformation from flawless princess to anxious, successful teen is an interesting study on how to keep the core idea of a character, but make them human. The toy icon is still the girl that can do anything, but now she has an emotional depth that places her on the same level as everyone else.
