The Barbie Diaries (2006) - Almost So Bad it's Good, But So Far Off the Mark.

When my friend suggested this movie, I initially thought to put it on my list of "I'll get to it eventually" movies, the movies I don't feel much priority in finding, watching or reviewing. However, on account that this movie was A). Made for TV (Full honesty, I actually thought it was initially made to be Direct-to-Video, but after some research that does not appear to be the case) and B). According to my friend, absolute garbage, I kept it on my immediate backlog. The Barbie Diaries seemed like it would be one of those "So bad it's entertaining" movies, so, despite it being a Barbie movie, I had to have a look. Hard to believe but I am actually quite familiar with the Barbie brand, I remember playing a Demo for Barbie Explorer on the PlayStation, and I swear at least a quarter of all toy commercials I saw as a kid were for a girls toy. I am also acutely aware of the many, many movies in the Barbie franchise, but have yet to see any of them. No I am not going to marathon them. I've thought about a Dragon Ball Z movie marathon but that would take way too long and would probably get way to repetitive after a while. Anyway, my friend said this movie was really bad... were they right?

So, what is the plot of this movie? No, seriously what is the plot? Barbie and her friends are sophomores in high school now and try to achieve that dream of every character in a girls movie ever, being popular. What is the way they do it this time? School news? Befriending the popular guy? Becoming class president? Band gig? How about all of them? On top of that there are many little subplots, like one of Barbie's friends trying to admit his feelings towards her, and Raquel being really catty towards Barbie. This is like a combination of everything I hate in a plot, vain airheaded-ness, a dozen things going on at once, predictability, nothing of any real substance happening, and of course, High School culture. I guess American high school during the 2000s was different than Canadian high school during the 2010s. I talked about this in my First Impressions of the 2021 Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, where I am just so done with the middle/high school depictions in media. It's really the same here.

Also, for whatever reason I just could not suspend my disbelief to the point where I could feasibly believe that Barbie, pop-culture icon, was the unpopular girl in school. It would be like trying to have Scrooge McDuck play in Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol. Granted I couldn't really see her as the catty queen bee that nobody actually likes, but like, not the unpopular kid. If Barbie qualifies as an unpopular girl, than this school would collapse if Daria walked in.

Let's get the immediate issue out of the way, the animation is awful, all caps, AWFUL! Close-ups make the characters look absolutely dead eyed, movement is stilted and stiff, lip-syncing is all off, and the models are those early 2000s CG that was out of date and aged by 2004. It looks like a cheap shovel ware PlayStation 2 or Wii game, which is actually hilarious when you consider that the actual Barbie games for the PlayStation2 and Nintendo Wii look way better than this movie. Heck, Barbie Explorer on PlayStation 1 looks better than this movie. At least the visuals here are bright and colourful, but I'd say they were too bright and colourful. It looked like someone turned up the contrast to the first season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic at times. The animation was actually agonizing to watch

I know I have talked about animation being more than a visual medium and I have handwaved aside other visually unappealing movies like Cats, but there is something I want to talk about. Not only do previous Barbie movies look better, but TV CGI has looked way better too. ReBoot looks outdated today, but it still looks better than this. VeggieTales, Jimmy Neutron, heck even if we want to bring in little kids shows, Rolie Polie Olie. All of those shows predate this movie, so this can't just be handwaved aside as "Standards of the time", this movie was made in the early 2000s, and we've been working with computer animation since the late 50s! What we might consider as "Modern" Computer Animation dates back to the 80s, so there really is no excuse for this movie looking and moving worse than the Money for Nothing music video. One should not judge an animated movie by how it looks, but there is a point where it just becomes difficult to watch.

To be fair, the music wasn't terrible, it was very 2000s, akin to Avril Lavigne or Kelly Clarkson, not music I normally listen to, I'm very much a 90s Alt Rock person, but I do have a varied taste in music and I am somewhat nostalgic for the 2000s. That being said, I wouldn't say the music in the movie was good, especially not the background music that felt very generic and uninspired. I dunno, if Sk8er Boi is one of your absolute jams, the songs in this movie might not be that bad for you, but if you're just a bit nostalgic for the 2000s days, I think you'll just grudgingly accept it like I did. Hey, Avril Lavigne is not the worst musician of the 2000s you could emulate, that was also the decade of Hinder and Puddle of Mudd. 

I mean, do I even need to say more? Characters? What character, most of them are just your basic stereotype. We don't even get much variety in there. I mean, where are the other stereotypes that we absolutely hate? The nerd, the goth, the weirdo, the artist, the kinds of characters we see in all of these school stories. I mean it wouldn't help matters, but at the same time it would at least offer some variety so that we're not watching the same two characters with minor personality differences. This movie is an absolute mess, and it almost qualifies as so bad it's good. If I were to rank all the bad movies, I'd put this one lower than that Hercules and Xena movie I reviewed back in... wow 2019... time flies. Unfortunately, this movie is not good on an entertainment level, once the initial novelty of the animation and 2000s aesthetic wear off, it just exposes the flaws of the writing more and more. Honestly, I guarantee that there are way better Barbie movies than this, ones that feel less brain rotting and have more substance to them. If Barbie movies are candy, than this movie is one of those Popeye Sugar Sticks that we all pretended were cigarettes as kids, absolutely disgusting.

First Impressions: Pinocchio: A True Story (2022)

It is not very often that a direct to video movie gets any kind of attention from critics or movie-goers, it really has to be something special to warrant the attention of movie fans. Maybe it's a cross-over between two iconic franchises that also just so happens to be the final role for on of the actors involved, maybe it's the movie based on a popular video game franchise that we've been waiting for since the original movies, or maybe it has some hilariously bad voice acting displayed front and center in the trailer. Pinocchio: A True Story is the third one, the trailer that everyone got to see thanks to AniMat (If I'm not mistaken the Tweet was a while ago) showcased some of the worst voice acting in an animated feature since Jeff Bridges in The Last Unicorn. The kicker of course is that, as other Twitter users have pointed out, Pauly Shore has done voice acting before, so... what exactly is going on here?

Sad to say but everything that people were making fun of about the movie prior to release, the infamous reading by Pauly Shore and the scene where Pinocchio gets shot happen within the first twenty minutes of the film, but it is still a treasure trove of absolute awfulness, completely unwatchable.

The voice acting is just all around terrible, not a single take sounds convincing or natural, with the exception of Tom Kenny, who of course is a seasoned professional, so while he puts on a typical Tom Kenny voice, his acting is still the best in this movie. What makes it even worse is that this is a dub-job, so while you're hearing bad voice actors read these lines, you're watching lips that never sync to the dialogue. You never tend to notice this stuff with dubbed anime because the mouth movements are fairly consistent, partially because of the Japanese language, and also because that's just how lip syncing works in animation now, there are a set number of mouth shapes that are used when needed, you can probably get away with using five or six different mouth shapes on a character and make a convincing enough dialogue scene. CG animation doesn't exactly work that way. On top of that, the DVD I purchased did not give me the option to watch this in the original Russian, which would have made the lip-sync less of a problem.

The lip-syncing reminds me of one of those GoodTimes Entertainment/Golden Films Disney knock-offs, specifically a version of Aladdin that I watched a while ago. There are moments where the dialogue comes out of mouths that are closed. The rest of the animation is... odd. Not in that Richard Williams or Tool music video kind of way, it's odd because it's obviously direct to video quality, but there are moments that don't look all that bad, like fix the lip-syncing and you could probably get away with putting some of these scenes in a theatrical production.

Honestly, that's the most interesting talking point. Not a whole lot else about this movie is interesting. The plot is not very interesting, I mean it's solid enough, but that's about it. You want to know something that is more interesting? Nimona has been revived!

Nimona is coming to Netflix in 2023 after being pulled from Disney's line-up. This means that plenty of dead projects can be revived by other studios, and also means that my favourite graphic novel of all time is getting it's movie adaptation finally! Seriously I'm very excited, and I'm not the only one. Plus, we have another Pinocchio movie coming soon, helmed by Guillermo del Toro. We're also getting that Blazing Samurai move finally... I mean I didn't say the interesting stuff was gonna be ALL good.

On some level, I can see why this got some attention, unlike a movie like Ella and the Little Sorceress, but if you want all the enjoyment you can get out of it, just watch the trailer. Really the movie's biggest crime is that it's boring, the voice acting is literally the most interesting thing about it. I can't even recommend this as a "So Bad It's Good" movie, but at the same time, I can't recommend people not watch it either. It's boring, but ultimately harmless, I don't think your perception of animation, nor direct-to-video cinema will be hurt by watching this. Granted the standards for Direct-to-Video cinema is low to begin with, but that's beside the point. If you see this for like, two dollars in a discount bin and want something just absolutely dumb to kill some time, there are worse things to spend your money on. Can't recommend it, but it does not irritate me by existing.