I think it's amazing that something like it exists, it never really excels at what it's doing but it tries to balance so many different aspects and influences while keeping the centre of its story about this coming to understanding and ultimately accepting that change is good, an idea can linger around for years and ultimately believe it is the one that had this idea that it had and that it's easier to be a doll but it's so much more meaningful to be a human.
It feels fragile, the foundations of it but the movie keeps going without caring about any of that and ultimately just says what it wants and I like that it's committed.
It weirdly reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once, both have very similar protagonists, both excel at taking elements from years of film, books and tv to comment on being a person and both take a very wild turn to get to the core message. I do feel like EEAAO is just a better film mostly because the message is more coherent, it feels more emotional and tightly written but Barbie is a rare meta-commentary of the movie that it is, it's the first time a movie has reminded me of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Doki Doki Literature Club and I love it for that.
7.5/10 also Kate McKinnon was just awesome in this movie
I disliked EEAO because its message is a hugbox that doesn't give realistic examples of healthy conflict resolution. The ironic dissonance between the action of the movie and the message don't mesh because the action is supposed to be showing familial/cultural strife and the message is about being kind due to unknown unknowns. However it doesn't actually resolve a significant dispute outside of a familial dynamic. As an immigrant I feel like this movie targeted me but the "lessons" I'm supposed to take home are completely trite compared to my real life interaction with cultural differences in my family. It's essentially a fantasy that pretends that your immigrant grandma will gleefully learn your American cultural boundaries after a difficult talk, something that my inter-generational immigrant family has no real experience with (and neither do many of my friends who are also immigrants and even more targeted by this movie because they're Asian).
Likewise outside a family dynamic this movie falls entirely flat, because despite all her flaws my grandmother is my family and I still have to take care of her. The American version of this is cutting your family out when they're annoying. Ironically the movie is also pick and choose about what properties of assimilation its characters take which feels very pidgeon holed in terms of its messaging. But beyond the family the movie doesn't really take a real stance on conflict resolution because of it's Looney Toons/Stephen Chow style approach. The martial arts are a metaphor for familial conflict, but by using that visual metaphor there is nowhere to escalate if the movie were to have a real villain rather than a metaphor for a teenager with a tantrum. I'm sorry in the real world you're not going to fight "hate" with "love" at the level of physical conflict.
Wow, I agree with all of this and it's likely that our different experiences lead to us having different opinions about the film. I still love it tho, I think what it says about being optimistic has a little more depth and nuance
I will agree with this, but I think the presentation sucks. It's overshadowed by the conflict. There's not enough repetition of a character getting beat down, choosing to maintain optimism, trying again only to get beat down because the alternative is personally unbearable in some way. That is ultimately the logical ends of the ideology behind optimism in that movie, but I think it's too "sad" to show to Americans. Americans culturally, cannot deal with the end of the handsome hamburger party. We have a tantrum. Instead the movie shows optimism through the idea of being a goofy silly little guy and putting googly eyes on stuff. Which to anyone who has ever met a goofy silly little guy they're often the most pessimistic or realistic people ever and not really optimists. In as such it doesn't really differentiate between practicing optimism and being intrinsically optimistic. The characters are just kinda just vaguely assigned this through the googly eye motif. It becomes very confused it doesn't have a clear presentation of the difficulty of a character choosing to practice optimism.
It really reminds me of the issue of orientalization and commodification of Eastern Philosophies. For example Buddhism is imported into America as a top down tool of corporate obedience and mindset shifting, rather than a bottom up understanding of life through a personal and reciprocal lens. A corporate American Buddhist may know that they clock out at 5PM and work stress is impermanent but they don't share their food at the end of the day because people are given what they are owed here. A traditional Buddhist shares their food because even grace is fleeting and it's better to share it than attempting to selfishly savor an impermanent experience.