Credit: Warner Bros.Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) hasn’t even come out yet, and it’s already shaping up to be the blockbuster movie of the summer. Leading up to the release of the movie, more details are being released and the actors have been weighing in on different aspects of the movie.
Margot Robbie revealed that she originally hadn’t intended to play Barbie, she just wanted to be involved. Ryan Gosling has expressed his own surprise at the reaction towards his portrayal of Ken. And Greta Gerwig has revealed that she wanted to tackle the issues of female coming of age and the representation of Barbie. Recently, however, there’s been another piece of information revealed about the film and it’s making pink lovers everywhere lose their minds.
Barbie is known for her signature pink color. It’s one of the few colors trademarked and copyrighted by a company. If you know anything about Barbie, you know she’s synonymous with pink. Obviously, Gerwig’s film had to address it. Business Insider recently revealed that so much pink paint was used on the set of the Barbie movie that it caused an international shortage of the color.
Gerwing told production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer to design a life-size, useable Barbie Dreamhouse to film in. The director insisted everything on set was pink in order to “maintain the kid-ness” and remind older viewers what they loved about Barbie in the first place. The set also utilized an hand-painted backdrop of the Barbie-land sky and mountains rather than rely on CGI for the effect.
Reactions to the trailers alone already have fans and moviegoers excited about the amount of color and brightness throughout the scenes, praising the movie for being so vividly colorful. The recent trend of moviemaking, in part due to gritty superhero films, has been a desaturation and a darkening color grade in movies.
When the initial trailers for Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid (2023) came out, many slammed the movie for being too dark, saying that the original movie was full of color and life, and the live-action should have reflected that. Thankfully, with the movie finally released, it seems that those fears and complaints were in vain. However, Disney’s other recent live-action, Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), did suffer from this issue, with many complaining that everything looked gray and boring in a world where everything was supposed to be magical and bright.
Overall, Barbie seems like it will be a breath of fresh air, a break from the superhero genre that has dominated the box office for over a decade, and an original take on a pre-existing subject rather than a reboot or remake. With excitement already high and expectations higher, it’s possible that Barbie will be the turning point in the film industry. A return to fun, campy movies, and bright visuals with vivid colors.
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