Setting the Barbie Scene

The sets of the Barbie movie did not fall out of the sky, they were carefully crafted by a dedicated team of professionals.

Kyle Buchanan (2023, “How Those ‘Barbie’ Dreamhouses Came to Life: ‘We All Had to Believe in It,’  The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/movies/barbie-movie-set-design.html) shares, for example, that “the movie’s production team embraced the surreal, going big on bright pinks and shrunken proportions. . . . ‘the Dreamhouses in the film are 23 per cent smaller than they would be, as are the cars and roads,’ Greenwood said. ‘When you scale the house down, you make the actors . . . seem bigger, which makes the whole thing seem ‘toy.’  Instead of adapting the Dreamhouses to feel more real, Greenwood and Spencer played up their surreality.  When Barbie opens her refrigerator, most of the foods are simply flat cartoon decals. . . . If it feels artificial, that’s the point. . . . ‘It’s fake-fake, which is perfect,’ Greenwood said.  ‘It’s almost Brechtian, the way [the director] approached it.’ .  . . There aren’t even whites, blacks or browns:  Anything in a Dreamhouse that would typically be those colors is just a different shade of pink.”

Sarah Greenwood was the production designer for the Barbie movie and Katie Spencer was the set director.

Pink!

The release of the Barbie movie has gotten the world all aflutter about the colour pink—which is likely to be a big plus for many.

Being in a space with a more muted, dusty (not very saturated) light pink is calming and can help you effectively manage the calories you are consuming.  Also, when women see the color pink they’re more optimistic—and while being delusional is never a good thing, being optimistic generally is.

Clare Thorp in the BBC Style Section (2023, “The Colour Pink and How the New Barbie Film Might Subvert Our Expectations,” https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230718-the-colour-pink-and-how-the-new-barbie-film-might-subvert-our-expectations) has this to say about pink: “Despite long being associated with submission and passivity, the colour pink has been reclaimed, symbolising subversiveness—which is embraced in the new Barbie film.”