Barbie

(On TV, April 2020) The title of Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie says it all. At first glance, it’s a documentary about the Barbie doll and how successful it was—a somewhat commonplace approach for hagiography. At second glance, it’s also a documentary that acknowledges the negative messages carried by the Barbie archetype of unnaturally tall and curvy blondes. Which leads to a third glance that wrestles with complex questions of cultural influence, influence and representation. As the title says, are we simply placing too much weight on a plastic doll’s shoulders by making it stand for everything that’s wrong about cultural sexism? The documentary does get candid access to the Barbie creative team at a crucial junction in the doll’s history (trying to remake its image after a sales slowdown), and that does open it up to suspicions of being a corporatist hagiography. The discussion is often framed as Barbie creators reacting to criticism, but Tiny Shoulders does work best at showing how everyone, from the documentarian to the self-reflective interviewees and the Barbie creators themselves, has fully absorbed the debate about Barbie—this is a modern documentary that’s aware of the state of the discussion about its topic. The result is quite up-to-date, and the titular tiny shoulders are revealed as being those of the very humanized self-doubting women (and a few men) entrusted with Barbie’s future. The result is not a puff piece, not an anti-Barbie piece, but somewhere in the informed, nuanced, slightly-sympathetic middle. In the trenches with the Barbie staff, a war-room sequence takes us in the trenches of media response to the relaunch of different Barbie body types in 2014ish, complete with last-minute stress prior to launch. (Among other virtues, Tiny Shoulders will warm the heart of anyone who’s ever been involved in a long-term project.) Alas, the follow-up story to this film is murkier—the curvy dolls earned a huge amount of media attention upon release, but have since then been largely sidelined in favour of a return to the basic body type… even if more diversity has remained. (According to the latest results, Barbie sales have rebounded, plateauing from 2015 to 2017, and increasing from 2017 to 2019… right as the new Barbies body types gave way to a return to form.) Still, Tiny Shoulders offers a revelatory look inside the management of brands at an era where a slight misstep can threaten a multi-generational brand. It’s not necessarily just for Barbie fans.