It was no easy process to place collectively a Barbie dreamland that felt full and actual, however not tacky or too simplistic. Director Greta Gerwig created this land in a method nobody else may have imagined, and she says she did it in a “maximalist” method, which she styled after a toddler. She instructed W Magazine that “when eight-year-old girls play dress up, they put on everything.” She went on:
“When I was a little girl, I loved Lisa Frank. I thought her art was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then as you get older, you say, ‘No, I have adult taste, and I don’t need sparkle dolphins.’ But there is still someone in you that loves a sparkle dolphin. You just have to let them out and play a little bit.”
When requested how she married that maximalism with the extra emotional and intimate issues she needed to the touch on in the movie, Gerwig went on to speak about her Shakespearean affect, saying:
“In no way am I comparing myself to this person—so please don’t think that I’m doing that, that would be mortifying—but I always think about the architecture of what we have in this film and the ontology of Barbie [in relation to] what I love so much about Shakespeare’s comedies. Stay with me. I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare. But I do think Shakespeare was a maximalist. There wasn’t anything that was too far or too crazy that couldn’t be worked through, and then there’d be something in the middle that felt quite human. I was thinking about it in those terms: a heightened theatricality that allows you to deal with big ideas in the midst of anarchic play.”
Whatever her inspiration, she made a gorgeous film that can go down in historical past as a blockbuster field workplace phenomenon and a fan favourite. Barbie continues to be in theaters.
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