Thus came 2001’s Barbie in the Nutcracker, Mattel Entertainment’s first full-length Barbie feature.

At the same time, television channels like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel were on the rise as they started to focus on original children’s entertainment. The foray into films was, of course, a Mattel marketing tactic: The company started producing its own Barbie movies to have the doll join the new digital frontier. The tactile CGI animation always made it feel as if you could physically pull Barbie out of the screen and into your dreamhouse.

These movies have never reached the animated innovation of Studio Ghibli’s stunners or even the least-beloved Disney titles, but that has always been okay because Barbie movies are just meant to make your mind play. The upcoming Greta Gerwig–directed film isn’t Barbie’s first foray into cinema, of course: Since the turn of the millennium, Barbie has crossed over from kids’ dreamhouses into the televisions of young kids (and nostalgic zillennials), first through straight-to-video movies.įor almost 20 years, Barbie has been a countless number of princesses, ballet dancers, and types of fairies, but she has also been a musketeer, an indentured servant (once), and kind of a bitch (see No. If the marketing for a certain summer blockbuster hasn’t made that clear enough, the bright-blonde, slender-framed, blue-eyed doll is, and she has been able to do anything she (well, Mattel execs) puts her plastic mind to.

Photos: Lions Gate Home Entertainmentīarbie is everything.

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