"Barbie" Filmed These Scenes Without CGI, And How They Accomplished It Behind The Scenes Is Simply Very Cool

There are some SPOILERS ahead for Barbie!

Hi, yes, hello. By now you probably know that Barbie is THE biggest movie of 2023. In its opening weekend alone, the film, directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, grossed $162 million domestically, thus helping reach the fourth-biggest weekend of all time at the box office.

Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, and more, Barbie tells the story of Barbie (Robbie), who ventures to the Real World after strange things start happening to her in Barbie Land.

What ensues is a hilarious trip to California, where Barbie and Ken (Gosling) learn what the Real World is like — Ken learns about patriarchy (and horses) while Barbie escapes the Mattel headquarters and joins forces with Gloria (Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt).

While moving between Barbie Land and the Real World, Barbie and Ken travel through a bunch of different scenes using a car, boat, spaceship, bicycle, camper van, and snowmobile, before rollerblading in Venice Beach.

The detailed travel route is done a few times in the movie, especially in reverse: when Ken returns to Barbie Land, when Barbie brings Gloria and Sasha to Barbie Land, and when the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell), Aaron Dinkins (Connor Swindells), and the other Mattel employees follow Barbie to Barbie Land.

While it's a fun transition montage every single time it happens, what makes it even better is how it was filmed. Namely, it was all done practically on set using some old school movie magic.

Instead of having the actors film these moments on a green or blue screen and have the elements CGI-ed in later, Barbie elected to build the sets and backdrops, which helped give the two-dimensional feeling that's seen in the finished scenes.

Greta said every time they filmed a transportation sequence, it was "the most satisfying thing to watch." She added, "I settled on wanting it to look like a diorama in the Natural History Museum."

"Each box contains a scene, and I wanted them to sort of move through that scene and then come out, and then move through the next scene," Greta said.

Production designer Sarah Greenwood explained that they studied how these things are done in theater, with the foreground moving very fast, and each element moves slightly slower as you move toward the backdrop.

Each element of the transition scene you see moving is actually being moved by crew members on the Barbie set during filming.

For the long tandem bike that the Mattel employees ride in on, bunches of flowers were on a track and being moved past them to give the illusion they were biking through the field.

Barbie using old filming techniques leans into Greta's overall vision for the movie, which was heavily inspired by classic soundstage musicals.

In an interview with Letterboxd, Greta revealed 33 classic movies that helped inspire Barbie like The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, The Red Shoes, and more.

Greta explained to Architectural Digest that because the first Barbie doll was released in 1959, she felt like she could "ground everything in that look of 1950s soundstage musicals."

This included hand-painting all of the backdrops you see in Barbie Land because those classic musicals had those beautiful, artificial skies. The painted backdrops coupled with lighting techniques helped create the eye-popping color in the scenery.

Overall, very little CGI was used in Barbie Land, so it looks like a toy. This meant that everything from the Dreamhouses to the props inside were built by the film's art department.

The production designers even figured out that they had to physically reduce everything by 23% in size, in order to give the feeling that the Barbies and Kens were being shoved into smaller spaces, just like when you play with the real dolls and accessories.

I absolutely adore all of the attention to detail that went into building Barbie Land in Barbie, and I cannot wait to see this movie so many more times and catch even more great details.

You can watch the full video of how the Barbie cast and crew brought the traveling scenes to life below:

Warner Bros / Via Twitter: @barbiethemovie

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