A minute into the trailer of the live-action Barbie motion picture film, a surrealist reinvention of the iconic American doll by cerebral, zeitgeist-y filmmaker Greta Gerwig, and I found myself scratching my head, thinking, “Where have I seen this before?”
Stereotypical Barbie (the blond iteration we all know) is, for the first time in sixty-plus years, facing an existentialist crisis in the plastic utopian dystopia of Barbieland where everything is peaches and cream and problems simply don’t exist. Distraught and dejected, Stereotypical Barbie seeks the counsel of Weird Barbie who instructs her to journey to “The Real World” (our world) to discover the “truths of the universe”.
This is where things get interesting.
We see Barbie and Ken in her famous pink 1957 Chevy convertible driving through a barren wasteland into “The Real World” while singing along to lesbian indie rock legends The Indigo Girls’ hit, Closer To Fine (random, but hey this is Greta Gerwig)
“The two share many cinematic parallels. Among them the message of repressed women needing to escape from a utopian dystopia to a so-called “Real World.”
Eerily similar to all this is the surrealist, Ursula K. Le Guin-channeling 90s anime film, The Adolescence of Utena.
Just like Barbie, the two lead characters, Utena and her lesbian lover Anthy, whom I should point out, strongly resemble Barbie dolls, escape their patriarchal utopian dystopia in a pink 1957 Chevy convertible and head to “The Outside World” passing first through a barren wasteland to reach their destination.
And like Barbie, The Adolescence of Utena is a visually striking subversion of a feminine narrative. In Barbie’s case, it’s the subversion of American girlhood culture. In Utena’s, it’s European fairy tales.
The cinematic parallels between the two are staggering.
It wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibilities for a worldly, creatively astute filmmaker like Gerwig who obviously has a deep love for cinema to have been influenced by a piece of philosophical postmodernist cinema like The Adolescence of Utena for her Barbie reimagining.
During her extensive Barbie press tour, Gerwig frequently mentions that Barbie is an both an amalgamation of and a loving homage to some of her favorite films including The Red Shoes, An American In Paris, Bringing Up Baby and Jacques Demy’s filmography. But while she merely takes visual cues from these disparate films, like Barbie Land’s plastic ocean (taken from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita), Barbie’s outfits (taken from Demy’s Umbrellas of Chernbourg) and replicated shots from The Red Shoes, she has yet to disclose the inspirations for the film’s narrative.
No more is this evident than the fact that she never mentioned The Matrix in interviews, even though it’s clear the existentialist film, which funnily enough was inspired by the anime film Ghost in the Shell, inspired her – Weird Barbie asks Stereotypical Barbie to choose between a bedazzled, pink high heel (the blue pill) or a ratty old Birkenstock (the red pill).
In fact, a litany of brilliant Hollywood films, including but not limited to, Black Swan, James Cameron’s Avatar movies and Inception owe their brilliance to anime films (Perfect Blue, Princess Mononoke and Paprika respectively).
Japan and its film industry, which consistently pushes the boundaries of the storytelling medium, has been influencing the oftentimes creatively stagnant Hollywood for decades so it shouldn’t come as any surprise if the Japanese Adolescence of Utena did indeed inspire Gerwig.
She just needs to be up front about it.
