It was no simple task to put together a Barbie dreamland that felt full and real, but not cheesy or too simplistic. Director Greta Gerwig created this land in a way no one else could have imagined, and she says she did it in a “maximalist” way, which she styled after a child. She told 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 asked how she married that maximalism with the more emotional and intimate things she wanted to touch on in the film, Gerwig went on to talk about her Shakespearean influence, 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 beautiful movie that will go down in history as a blockbuster box office phenomenon and a fan favorite. Barbie is still in theaters.
