Summary
- The Barbie movie's production design is top-notch, with attention to detail in every prop and set, including Barbie's bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen in Barbieland.
- The "Mojo Dojo Casa Houses" in Barbieland, created by Ken after experiencing the real world, are intentionally ugly and tacky, filled with equestrian accents, mini-fridges, and La-Z-Boys.
- The production designers had to keep pushing the ugliness of Ken's makeover at the request of director Greta Gerwig, who wanted an authentically artificial and ugly aesthetic. Many crew members wanted to buy items from the Ken-dom.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Barbie.
The Barbie movie's production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer reveal that Ken's "Mojo Dojo Casa House" is even more ridiculous than you realized. Directed by Greta Gerwig, the Barbie movie finds Margot Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie leaving the matriarchal utopia of Barbieland in search of self-discovery in the real world (while reluctantly allowing Ryan Gosling's Ken to join her). Once Ken gets a taste of the patriarchy in the real world, he returns home and turns Barbieland into his own "Ken-dom," renovating the Dreamhouses into "Mojo Dojo Casa Houses" replete with La-Z-Boys, mini-fridges, and equestrian accents.
Following Barbie's stellar release, Greenwood and Spencer revealed in an interview with The New York Times, that Ken's "Mojo Dojo Casa House" has a plethora of ridiculous details. The set designers say that Gerwig kept pushing them to make the manly makeover uglier and revealed some hidden details about the houses, such as barbecues being thoughtlessly thrown onto the ovens, the juicers being filled with Doritos, and the TVs all playing the same continuous clip of galloping horse. Read what the two shared below:
Greenwood: We had to keep going back to Greta and saying, really? Really ugly? But there’s a purity to the ugliness as well, because it’s a limited palate.
Spencer: He’s no interior designer, Ken. But can I just say, a lot of the crew wanted to buy things from the Ken-dom. I’m not saying who, but a lot of them did.
The Barbie Movie's Production Design Is Top-Notch
The immersiveness of the Barbie movie absolutely starts with its sensational production design. Despite the detour to the real world, much of the film takes place in the perfectly pink paradise of Barbieland in a row of Dreamhouses resembling the Mattel toys. Here, a painstaking amount of detail was put into every prop in Barbie's bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The Barbieland set was built practically rather than relying on CGI, with Gerwig taking inspiration from the sound stages and painted skies seen in The Wizard of Oz, which she calls "authentically artificial."
Once Ken is introduced to the power of the patriarchy in the real world and returns to take over Barbieland, the production design takes on a drastically different tone. Gone is the perfectly pink paradise of Barbieland, with the Dreamhouses replaced by the redundantly named "Mojo Dojo Casa Houses" replete with horse-themed decorations, which Ken considers the ultimate symbol of masculinity. This superb set design all but guarantees that the Barbie movie will be in the running for the Academy Award for Best Production Design come Oscar season.
Source: The New York Times
