I wrote an essay for The Wrench Dispatch: The Movie Issue about visuals in Barbie and Pleasantville. The zine came out in January 2024 and collected essays about recent movies.
The essay is about 900 words, so I’m going old school and putting it under a Read More. So retro.
Five ways the Barbie movie uses visuals to share information about the world
The Barbie movie starts with a reference to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that’s how I knew that visuals would be important in this movie.
Barbie isn’t the first movie to share so much information about the world through visuals, but it’s the first one I’ve seen in a while to do it so well. Pleasantville (1998, directed by Gary Ross and starring Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) uses color and 1950s sitcom tropes to share information about the world.
Let’s take a look at how these movies use visuals.
1. Saturated colors are positive
In Barbie Land, colors are saturated and bright. The color palette leans heavily on pinks (so many shades of pink!). The sky is a perfect shade of blue, and the grass is a perfect shade of green. Nothing is out of place.
When Barbie and Ken go to the real world, colors are not as saturated. They feel more grounded. The outfits that Barbie and Ken wear while rollerblading have neon colors and busy patterns. They stick out immediately in the real world, even though the outfits would have been normal in Barbie Land.
In Pleasantville, David and Jennifer are transported to Pleastantville, a black and white 1950s-style sitcom. When everything is normal in Pleasantville, objects and people are in black and white. As Jennifer starts influencing the town, objects take on saturated colors, starting with a red rose. Characters appear in color after they express themselves or reach their potential.
Barbie uses colors to differentiate between Barbie Land (vibrant colors) and the real world (grounded colors). Pleastantville uses the transition from black and white to color to show changes in the sitcom world and characters.
2. No liquids in Barbie Land
There aren’t any liquids in Barbie Land to fit the concept that there aren’t any liquids in Barbie playsets. Barbie takes a shower, but no water comes out of the shower head. She gets a carton of milk from the fridge, but the carton is empty. Barbie can walk across the pool because the surface is a sheet of blue plastic. And even the beach doesn’t have water, which is why Ken bounces off a rigid wave when he tries running into the ocean.
Pleasantville does have liquids. There’s maple syrup at the breakfast table, and characters drink soda at the diner. But one thing Pleasantville is missing is toilets. In one scene, Jennifer goes into the bathroom at the diner and pushes a stall door open. It’s an empty space. This is a reference to TV standards in real life. In the 1950s and 1960s, American TV shows did not show toilets. It was considered bad taste.
3. Vehicles are props
Barbie knows how to drive but her car seems to go on its own. In one scene, she waves to other Barbies and even takes both hands off the wheel. The car continues on a perfect path on the road. Also, the car’s rear-view mirror is a sticker, playing into the idea that it’s there for show instead of function. The car is a toy and Barbie doesn’t actually need to look in the rear-view mirror while she drives.
In Pleasantville, the firefighters drive the firetruck, and they know how to use the ladders to rescue cats. But they don’t know what the hoses are for, since there weren’t fires in Pleasantville before. The firemen are surprised that the hoses work, because they never needed to use them before.
4. No one uses the stairs
All the dream houses in Barbie Land have stairs, but no one uses them. Barbies appear on one floor and then a different floor, much like how a child would move a doll from one floor to another in a dollhouse.
A similar thing happens in the sitcom world in Pleasantville. Scenes take place upstairs or downstairs, but we do not follow characters up or down the stairs. This adds to the construct of sets for TV sitcoms.
5. Physical appearance isn’t natural
Barbies in Barbie Land move in realistic ways, but details remind us that Barbies are dolls. When Barbie steps out of her slippers, her feet stay on tip-toes, as if she’s wearing heels. When Barbie walks, sometimes she poses her hands with straightened fingers (much like a Barbie doll’s hands), instead of relaxed hands. There are moments when Barbie sits up or stands where her upper body moves as one, reflecting how Barbie dolls bend at the waist but otherwise have limited upper body movement.
After Barbie has thoughts about death, she loses some of her doll-like features. On the beach, she notices her feet are now flat. When she’s talking to Weird Barbie, Barbie notices she has cellulite on her thighs. These two examples show Barbie connecting with the real world.
In Pleasantville, there aren’t body changes, but there is a notable shift in how people look and carry themselves. Early in the movie, characters conform to each other. The women are in cardigans and poodle skirts with perfect makeup and hair. The men are all clean cut in tidy clothes. Everyone has good posture.
As the movie progresses and colors seep in, we see variations in their outfits and more relaxed body language.
Barbie and Pleasantville use visuals to tell the audience about the world. Both movies deliver visual information through colors, deviations from objects in the real world (liquids, vehicles, and staircases), and physical appearance. All these visual details enrich the characters and stories in Barbie and Pleasantville.