Mommy Brain

(The Barbie Diaries was provided to me free of charge by Special Ops Media for the purpose of review.)

Barbie Diaries is - like - totally different than all those other Barbie movies. You know, the ones that are - like - fairy tales and are beautifully done with wonderful music and characters voiced by terrific actors, including Kelsey Grammer and Angelica Huston. This movie is about Barbie being in high school, and she is - like - so not popular and how everything changes because of this special diary that she writes in.

The really amazing thing about this movie is that the animators only had to draw two characters - boy character and girl character. The body types are all the same (thin for the girls and buff for the guys), so they only had to switch out the heads and clothes to make all these - like - totally awesome-looking high school students.

Okay, I’m going to quit with the “like”s and “totally”s before I make myself vomit. In case you couldn’t tell, I hated this movie. And I’m not anti-Barbie. At least, I didn’t used to be. Natalie has Barbies, although we’ve avoided the My Scene dolls that are basically Bratz wanna-bes.

Natalie has the DVDs Barbie in the Princess and the Pauper and Barbie in Swan Lake and we’ve rented all of the other titles of that type and have enjoyed them together. When I was offered the chance to review the new Barbie DVD, I thought, terrific - we love all the other ones. But as I said before, this is not the same type of movie.

The characters in this movie are the type of shallow, clothes-and-boys-obsessed girls that drive me crazy at Walmart, the park, and sadly, at church. This is not what I want Natalie to grow up to be.

I guess the only good thing I can say about this DVD is that it has opened up some topics of conversation with Natalie. Things like what is important in a friend and in our behavior and treatment of others.

When I asked Natalie if she liked the movie, she said, “I think so.” She wasn’t raving about it. Her friend, who was having a sleepover, said, “The girls shouldn’t act like that but it was a cool movie.” So I’m sure that a lot of tween and pre-teen girls would enjoy this movie. But for our family, I think we’ll go back to the fairy tales.

The DVD is special edition that includes a diary that looks like the one Barbie was given in the movie. There are many special features on the DVD that would appeal to most girls. You can view a trailer of the movie here, and it can be purchased at any retailer that sells DVDs after it’s release date of May 9th.