Barbie has the inherent appeal on which film studios now rely Barbie is a brand that keeps changing with the times
Those of us born in 1959 sometimes reflect on our own mortality. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Barbie asks her fellow dolls as they dance happily together in the forthcoming film comedy co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig. A needle scratches, the music stops and they stare blankly: clearly not. So Stereotypical Barbie (the name of the character played by Margot Robbie) has to leave Barbie Land, and explore her existential doubts in the Real World.
“Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever,” she is taught by a character called Ruth, presumably based on Ruth Handler, the inventor of the world’s most popular doll and co-founder of Mattel, its owner. That is the reassuring moral of Barbie the film, expected to be a summer blockbuster, and there is some truth to it. Barbie the trademark is 64 and shows no sign of expiring, despite a midlife crisis a decade ago. It is the latest renaissance for a brand that has felt outdated for much of its existence, yet remains potent enough to outflank rivals. “We haven’t played with Barbie since we were, like, five years old,” one scornful gaggle of teens informs Robbie. Bratz, Disney Princess and Frozen’s Elsa dolls have periodically been more fashionable and Barbies have steadily been updated over the years with different hair styles, body shapes and skin tones. But what Mattel calls “original Barbie” is the icon: who else? Longevity is the ultimate test of a brand: not whether it stays in fashion all the time but whether it can keep on coming back. A lot of that is down to adaptability. There will be spin-offs and extensions but there must be a quality that allows the original to last: sweet fizz for Coca-Cola, male grooming for Gillette and female aspiration for the first adult doll for children. Barbie has the inherent appeal on which film studios now rely, although Gerwig had to build a narrative for her, opting for a meta-comedy in which Will Ferrell plays a bombastic chief executive of Mattel.
She is a classic kidult brand, with the fame to tempt generations of risk-averse film-goers to the opening weekend this month. Adapting brands is known as IP (intellectual property) filmmaking, and it has spread from the Transformers films based on Hasbro toys to Disney’s Marvel franchise. It dismays auteurs from the golden (or imagined golden) days of film: Martin Scorsese, director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas has called it “brutal and inhospitable to art.” Hollywood certainly has a cynical heart: Barbie was banned this week from opening in Vietnam for including on a map the “nine-dash line” that China uses to claim sovereignty over territory in the South China Sea. It could have been an oversight, but I doubt it: both Mattel and Barbie’s studio Warner Bros want to please Chinese consumers. Film creativity is not dead, though. It simply has to work within tight confines such as Barbie’s pantone pink Dreamhouse, into which Gerwig crams knowing jokes that would please a critical theorist. Is her Barbie really less inventive than the fey universe built by Wes Anderson, who is admired by Scorsese, in films such as Asteroid City?
Mattel is just as enthusiastic an exploiter as any studio of its brands, which include Hot Wheels, American Girl and Barney. Apart from Barbie, it is developing 14 other live action film spin-offs, and often resorts to legal action to protect its IP, with mixed results. In 2002, it lost a well-known trademark claim over the pop song “Barbie Girl” by the band Aqua, which surfaces on the Barbie soundtrack. Recommended Miranda Green ‘Mean Girls’ and modern times But Barbie’s remarkable resilience stems less from rigorous IP enforcement than the flexibility of Handler’s invention. She took the notion of an adult doll from a racy German creation called Lilli, adapting it for the little girls she saw playing at make-believe with paper cut-outs. They wanted a toy to help them imagine being adults and she gave them the postwar ideal. Original Barbie, with her impossibly narrow waist, high-arched feet and housewifely aspirations, soon dated: she ceded popularity 20 years ago to the sassier, shapelier Bratz dolls (over which Mattel sued). But Mattel caught up: it now has diverse Barbies with many professions including a Naomi Osaka doll, complete with tennis racket.
Barbie’s essence lies in her spirit rather than her appearance, which brings longevity. “The core of the brand is the idea of inspiring girls and letting them dream, create and make believe. You can change the dolls but the appeal does not alter,” says Chloe Preece, an associate professor of marketing at ESCP business school. This doll is tough enough to withstand ridicule. No one “likes to be the butt of a joke, not even a trademark”, the US Supreme Court noted last month. But Mattel allowed Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach to satirise (albeit affectionately) both the company and its leading brand.
You have to be confident in your property to let those two play around with it. Barbie is a story of a cheerful doll plunging into “a full-on existential crisis” but trademarks are infinitely renewable. So far, Barbie is too.
