This is the second time I watched Barbie and I’m still trying to unpack why I feel such antipathy when it’s generally charming.

I hadn’t really wanted to watch it again, but my mommy hadn’t seen it yet, I had her captive at my house, and I wanted to be able to Discuss. This woman gave me most of my taste in media. I like watching things with her.

Since it’s been a minute since I wrote the first review (all of a month ago), I thought I might like Barbie better. Sometimes I have to get over the shock/disappointment/dismay/whatever-the-fuck-is-happening-inside-my-chaos-brain of seeing a movie for the first time, and realizing the values are so distant from mine. And then after that, it’s fine. I just anticipate the good parts and ignore the bad parts.

Although I found myself more capable of enjoying Ken now that I’m resigned to the movie being so Ken-focused, I found the last act to be as much a needle in the balloon of my enthusiasm as the first time. It’s just so bleak.

My original review doesn’t really change.

I wonder if I would like Barbie out of the context of its time, when I didn’t spend a year suffering under the oppressive Barbeinheimer marketing (I’m Very Online so I just saw tons of it), but I am inclined to think I would not. As I said before, there is a deep cynicism to Barbie that always makes me imagine Greta Gerwig frowning while she sips champagne in a fancy California rich-people winery or something, telling herself, “Ugh being a woman is so hard.”

Since I have fewer big-picture thoughts analyzing Barbie on second watch, I roll my eyes more at the amount of Manliness in this movie advertised to be about Womanity. Ken’s arc is more dynamic than Barbie’s, he has a better musical number, everyone praises Ryan Gosling while mentioning Margot Robbie mostly in passing. Sometimes it feels more like a Noah Baumbach movie that let Greta Gerwig vent her womanly feelings.

The generalizations about still gender don’t speak to me, beyond the fact I recognize some people recognize some qualities as belonging to some genders. Thinking about the whole guy playing guitar being sad when a girl deprives him of attention thing — it’s like the movie is complaining about a stereotype I’ve only ever seen as a stereotype? It feels like we’re meant to be like “lol yeah THAT GUY, guys do that ALL THE TIME lollll” and I’m just like, “…do they?”

Feminist struggles in this movie are mostly men not taking women seriously, which is toothless.

The executive dick-sucking on screen is exhausting. The obvious insecurity of IRL Mattel executives needing to be soothed is exhausting. Even a few jabs have to be softened and ultimately allowed to fizzle out.

It’s that latter point that makes me feel the real problem with Barbie is actually its budget, like most contemporary blockbusters. These movies are simply too expensive. That means they *must* be *so* many things to *so* many people, mostly executives, who get elbow-deep in something that is actually just an unreasonably huge investment into a project that would have been a satisfying mid-budget kids’ movie, smearing corporate neediness all over some imperfect artists who are telling an incredibly personal message that is not as generalized as the movie constantly states. By centering Barbie as some icon of gender, and putting so much money into it, vastly overstating the importance and universality of the messages therein was inevitable; execution is incapable of matching expectations.

Barbie shouts, “Feminism!” and the marketing is forced to say that’s revolutionary because it’s revolutionary to the c-suite dudes who allowed it. But outside that tiny slice of world, feminism is not nearly so narrow, and “acknowledging the cognitive dissonance” doesn’t *actually* take away the patriarchy’s power on the people it marginalizes, unless you have the privileges of Gerwig and Baumbach and Robbie and Gosling and–

So that’s where my glass onion feeling comes from: there are a lot of things to consider about Barbie, which has more elements and bigger statements than it really has the capacity for carrying. When you pick them all apart you find it’s really just a toy movie with a story only as universal as being wealthy white Americans who suffer catering to the c-suite to afford caviar.

As always: Massive kudos to the art team. This thing is visual candy. I wish I didn’t think so much, honestly, because I love the fashion, I love the colors, I love the idea of commuting between universes via a cute catalog of Barbie scenes. I want to walk around my neighborhood saying, “Hi Barbie!” There is a lot to like, but I would like it SO much more if Barbie had acknowledged the fact it mostly serves to empower the already rich and powerful Barbies and Kens of the real world. Or like. Not done that.

Also my kids found it wildly boring. So whatever it is, it’s not necessarily a kids’ movie. We remain a Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse family. (And my mother did not like Ken.)

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

If you know me at all, you know that giving Princess Mononoke four stars is *weird*. I will five-star movies much worse than this one. And the original movie in Japanese, Mononoke Hime (1997), is absolutely a five star movie! This is a magnificent, compassionate, thoughtful story asking questions about the “versus” part of “man versus nature,” and the mythic scale of this folk fantasy is *so* up my alley.

But tonight I watched Princess Mononoke (1999), the version released in the USA with English-speaking voice actors like Gillian Anderson, Claire Daines, and Minnie Driver.

I think all the English dubs of Studio Ghibli movies I’ve seen have significantly altered the way information is conveyed. I get the sense that more mature animation like Princess Mononoke was confusing to Western markets, who only had a blueprint for mass-marketing kids’ animation, and thus feel compelled to simplify the concepts. It feels painful every time it happens. It’s not quite as bad in Princess Mononoke as Spirited Away, but it does mean the English dubs are distinct unto themselves.

The quality of the dub itself is dodgy. The performers involved are good in other contexts, but the voice work here feels paced badly. I suspect a combination of voice director choices and translation choices are to thank. It often feels like they’re trying to rush a lot of words into a few seconds of animation. Plus, inappropriate inflection abounds, leaving Claire Daines rush-shouting half her lines.

It’s a shame that the American-facing presentation is so unfortunate. Studio Ghibli movies have always felt a bit worse for their handling in the translation.

I have zero complaints or criticisms about the source material. As I grow older, I learn to admire the craftsmanship of Princess Mononoke in all-new ways. It’s visually stunning beyond the scope of one little review to describe. The music is so grand and emotional.

It’s fascinating that I have become radical in my politics in a way that Princess Mononoke challenges. The movie itself is radically ecological, which I would say describes me too. But ultimately, Princess Mononoke isn’t about ecological politics. It’s about how choosing hatred will kill everyone and everything, and the only way to do that is to stop choosing hatred.

By taking the focus away from what is right or wrong behavior from the humans — the hero’s goal is always simply saving lives, choosing life over death — the story can speak to anyone by asking, “Are you driven by hatred?

Ashitaka consistently chooses compassion for individuals I don’t think I’d try to save. It makes me look into my own heart and see places where the thrashing poison of hatred has plenty of room to grow.

The compassionate detail Princess Mononoke provides to the story’s factions has always jumped out at me.

Jigo is probably the worst figure in the movie. He is driven exclusively by greed, and validated by the assumption everyone is as greedy as he is, but he also regards Ashitaka as a friend. He’s out to kill nature for the Emperor’s pleasure, and in return, Jigo will get “everything.” Even when the world is falling down around them, Jigo scrabbles for his greedy goals…and then the movie leaves him shrugging it off when he fails. He’s sort of charming. Obviously he’s not good, at all, but the takeaway is one of someone self-centered but affable.

Lady Eboshi is my favorite of the antagonists. She’s afraid of nothing. You can tell the worst has already happened to her, so she welcomes the vengeance of nature’s curse. What powerful compassion it takes to gather a community of sex workers and lepers and gainfully employ them! Eboshi is the ultimate girl boss, stopping at nothing to accrue power in a system that has crushed them all. But she’s trying to take others with her. She’s trying to give her people a fair shot. You could say Eboshi stands to show the way that shit flows ever-downward in an empire: In order to claim any power in the empire as a woman, leper, sex worker, she has to pass the shit further down the empire’s power chain, which means nature.

I want to call Moro, the mother of the wolves, one of the good guys, but that wouldn’t be fair to the neutrality of Ashitaka’s perspective as narrator. All the nature gods are excellent expressions of the animistic understanding of nature. Nature is not good or bad, but it is full of instincts that can lead to your death. Moro wants the humans dead. Yet she has taken her “ugly, beautiful” human daughter, San, and treasures her the way she treasures her full-wolf sons. Moro is both a violent protector of the forest and a benevolent mother.

Alongside the Moro clan, we also get to know the boars, led by old Lord Okkoto, and the vicious primate spirits of the forest. And the Spirit of the Forest himself: a deer-like creature who turns into a ghostly giant at night. He doesn’t represent life and death. He is life and death.

Princess Mononoke has a humbling view on human hierarchy. For all that Lady Eboshi and Jigo are ensuring that shit continues flowing downward in their system — to the point of successfully killing the forest spirits — life and death are greater than all of that still.

Hence choosing hatred is choosing death, but the story doesn’t frame that as a failing so much as a maladaptive response to a terrible system that does things like letting samurai murder innocents and extinguishing indigenous tribes.

In a historical context, it makes sense that Princess Mononoke would so neutrally portray the humans’ cruelty against nature, human cruelty against humans, and of greater elemental forces against humans. Like all empires, Japanese empires have been responsible for a lot of harm in their country and elsewhere. Here, Studio Ghibli wants us to remember that these were just humans committing atrocities. People who loved and hurt and were trying to better themselves and had passions and could be your neighbors.

The only way to stop that kind of harm is to stop choosing hate, period, and give it nowhere to grow. It’s beautiful messaging in a beautiful movie that doesn’t flinch back from the tragedy of empire. And if you haven’t seen it before, I recommend watching the version with Japanese subtitles, not the English dub.

(image credit: GKIDS)