#Barbie does look good but once I have a movie spoiled then I kinda just. lose interest LMAO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fluffykitteninabox · 2 years

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Barbie and the secret door review

I have mixed feelings about this movie. I'll start by listing the things I liked about it and then move on to the things i dislike and how I think it could be improved.

The animation looks great

I honestly like the concept. An introverted socially awkward bookworm princess who's trying to avoid her duties finds a secret magic kingdom hidden behind a magic door in her garden. Cool.

I like the butler. He understands her need to not be around people and he doesn't judge her for it. He doesn't push her to be more sociable.

I like that her mother isn't overly strict. I like how supportive the grandmother is. She doesn't push Alexa either. She gives her the book as a way to encourage her to grow on her own.

I like the modern setting. This is super subjective but I like the modern princess idea. Princess Charm School has the same appeal. It separates it from all the "unspecified time before cars and electricity were a thing" than most princess movies take place in.

And that's it. It's honestly disappointing, especially if you watch it right after something like princess and the pauper like i did. I wanted to like it but it lost me once Alexa entered the secret magic kingdom.

So what went wrong?

First of all, the magic kingdom is ugly! The design is so awful that It made me wonder if it's possible to vomit from my eyeballs! It looked more like a candy crash level than a magic kingdom.

The villain. Melucia is annoying. I know she's meant to be annoying. She's a spoiled brat it's to be expected, but that doesn't make for a good villain in my opinion. She does get a couple of funny lines but that's not enough to save her as a character.

Usually the sidekicks and minions are the stupid ones so that they'll make the main baddie look scary. But in this movie our main villain is the stupid one. You mean to tell me she managed to take over the entire kingdom and steal everyone's magic, when even her own servants won't take her seriously?

We're shown in the movie that people can easily trick her. She's not super smart, she's not super powerful so what's stopping anyone from just overthrowing her?

Alexa's friends.

At the beginning of the movie we're introduced to Alexa's two supposedly best friends Samantha and Jenna. They first appear during the dance lesson, then they're not there for most of the movie and then they appear again at the end just to dance with Alexa so that it looks nice and symmetrical on screen!

They literally do nothing. Alexa spends most of the movie with two completely different girls she meets in the magic kingdom, so why are they even here?

Actually I know exactly why they're here. It's so that Universal Studios can check the "Barbie's two poc friends" box so they can claim there's representation in the movie!

The plot... is kinda boring. Perhaps that's a byproduct of Melucia not being the least bit threatening as a villain.

oh nooo.. she's trying to... steal everyone's magic...

oh no she.... managed to steal everyone's magic

oh the irony.... her own greed was her downfall....

Like... why did they need Alexa to save them? Is everyone else in the kingdom just... stupid? They can't outsmart a child by themselves?

Anyway here's how I would fix it:

change the design to something that won't make me want to stab my eyes with a fork

make Melucia smart. That will make her takeover more believable and make her a scarier villain. Make it so that she can't just be tricked by anyone. make her minions tremble with fear. No one has the guts to make fun of her.

Either change it so that Alexa's friends go with her to the magic kingdom, or have Alexa travel back and forth through the door. Personally I prefer the second option, though that might work better as a show instead of a movie.

This will also help us get more attached to the place itself and it will feel more satisfying when Melucia is finally defeated. Think of the 12 dancing princesses. They visited their magic dance island several times and we saw what the place meant to them personally, so when it was in danger of being destroyed we felt that.

So having Alexa travel back and forth a few times will help with that while also giving some more screen time to the neglected cast in her own world. I would also love to see her try to solve the magic kingdom's problems using methods she learned in her own world. It would help with her character development.

That's about it. I don't think there's anything else that needs to be changed. The movie was average and I got bored very quickly, but it had some good elements that could work if they were executed better.

#barbie and the secret door

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marathoning-barbie · 2 years

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Watching and ranking all (for now) 39 Barbie movies: an introduction

Oh God. How do I even start?

I was absolutely obsessed with the 3D-animated Barbie movies as a child. I religiously watched all of the ones up until Barbie and the Three Musketeers before I sadly dived right into my tween Not Like Other Girls™ phase and decided they were too immature and girly for me. Internalized misogyny is a bitch.

During lockdown, I eventually had the idea to marathon every single one of these movies. I started in early 2020, back when the movie franchise was still in a hiatus, then took a break and restarted the entire thing in late 2021, and now, 39 movies later, here we are.

I don’t really expect anyone to truly care about my opinions on any of these movies. I don’t even think anyone will ever see this, apart from the random seemingly-not-bot person who started following me before I even posted anything (shoutout to you, I guess). With some of the movies I kinda hope people won’t care, because the alternative is anger. But if anyone does see this, I hope my fevered rantings are mildly amusing to you.

I mostly did this to catch up with all the movies that came “after my time”; not just because of curiosity. If you look at any discussion of these movies online, especially Youtube, there is a pretty clear pattern among people giving their opinion that whichever movie they saw last as a child was “obviously” the last good Barbie movie, and all the others since had been irredeemable trash. That can be as early as Swan Lake or as late as Rock ‘N Royals (and I definitely receive 10 points of psychic damage whenever that one is counted as old). It’s such an obvious pattern that I’m about 90% sure I could tell you which movie a person considers to be the last good one if you told me their age. That’s hyperbole, don’t actually test me.

I always thought this was an unfair assessment. I mean, I can’t deny nostalgia isn’t important to me either; I won’t even pretend my dumb little reviews or my ranking are in any way objective. But I still didn’t want to bash on the new movies just because they were new. I’m sure I’d have counted many of them among my favorites if they came out early enough for me to have watched them. Some of them are among my favorites now even without nostalgia. Not to spoil the rankings, but my avatar is a pretty obvious sign.

I have now watched every single one of these movies at least once, and I have a bit of a preliminary ranking, though I won’t publish that one yet. I will go through each movie in release order, give a super short description of the plot and then remark on everything that stood out to me — whether good or bad. I might even bring up the movie-tie-in doll if I feel like it.

After I’ve finished my reviews for at least two movies, I’ll create a ranking post, which I’ll edit whenever the next review is posted. I might rewatch a movie again before writing the review, but I won’t make that a rule, because some of these I really don’t want to see again. It should also be noted that I’m looking at these from the eyes of a young adult woman, and I’ll not only be downright mean to the movies I didn’t particularly like, I also swear way too much for my own good. Sorry for any actual kids reading this I guess.

I’m not sure if I’ll make it to the end, and if I notice that I’m not gonna continue this I’m just going to post the full final ranking and be done, but let’s hope it won’t come to that. Also, if a new movie is released while I’m working on this blog, I’ll watch and review it as well.

Now that all this is over, I guess we can go on to the reviews. I’ll post the first one in a few hours, and the rest every few days afterwards. Don’t expect me to have a proper schedule. If anyone actually reads this, feel free to ask whatever or just tell me how wrong my opinion on a movie is.

Note: I am aware of the existence of the 80s movies, but since they’re separated from the 3D-animated movies, I won’t count them for this marathon.

#barbie #barbie movies #barbie movie reviews #introduction #i don't know how to tumblr sorry #my tags are going to be a mess

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