Animating Plastic Girlhood: The Aesthetics of Barbie in Life in the Dreamhouse and Vlogs

This chapter compares two CG Barbie animated web series from the 2010s, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse and Barbie Vlogs, to demonstrate how Mattel reformatted Barbie for the social media platform age. The chapter compares Mattel’s differing approaches towards each series in terms of narrative and animation aesthetics. Drawing on theories of girlhood and plasticity, this chapter situates Barbie as thoroughly plastic: as a doll, as a girl, and as animation. Such plasticity enables malleability, but while Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse embraces Barbie’s malleability as a doll through postmodern play, Barbie Vlogs delimits Barbie’s malleability through narrative and aesthetic shifts towards realism by making her a “real” girl. The shift from Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse to Barbie Vlogs illustrates the plasticity of girls as a cultural signifier, and how animation amplifies such plasticity through its own medium specificity. Barbie is reformatted from doll to girl, adapting her to a new era of social media platforms.