Barbie: A Perfect Christmas (2011)
On November 8, 2023 by CrescentBarbie: A Perfect Christmas is the first holiday movie that isn’t an adaptation. It’s a step into unfamiliar waters for Barbie, and I wish it stuck the landing better than it did. Unfortunately… Here we are. This feels more like a Hallmark movie than a Barbie movie, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
Story
Perfect Christmas follows Barbie and her three younger sisters–Skipper, Stacie, and Chelsea–through their misadventures in the holiday season. After running into turbulent weather and flight cancellations, the sisters are left stranded at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. With their Christmas plans ruined, the girls have no choice but to make the most of their bad situation to reclaim their holiday joy.
This movie is very slow. It doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself for more than half of the runtime. You could say that’s part of the point since they need to find their Christmas joy, but honestly, it’s just poor pacing. This movie is trying to be a character driven story, but it’s not succeeding at all. That only works if the characters are interesting, and there’s not really much of note here. This is the debut for Barbie’s sister in the Barbie cinematic universe, and they really come in on a whimper.
While this might not be the best metric of a movie’s quality, I will say that I nearly fell asleep watching this movie. Multiple times. I had to pause the movie to wake myself up in order to make sure I could get through it. This movie is agonizingly slow, taking a premise that sounds decent and dragging it out for too long. This could have been a forty minute special. Why do we need to sit here for 74 minutes?
Perfect Christmas is a very poorly paced movie, and it does very little to keep the audience entertained.
Story: 2/10
Characters
Perfect Christmas is clearly trying to go for a character driven story in which the cast takes center stage. The story revolves around them taking control of the holiday season… But that would require a good cast. Barbie is fine here, but she’s not all that interesting. Skipper’s arc feels bland and takes ages to go anywhere because of the poor pacing. Christie doesn’t do much either, instead just delivering plot convenience as needed. That’s the point, but it doesn’t make it any more enjoyable.
Stacie and Chelsea are the weakest links in this already poor cast. They spend a lot of the movie fighting as you would expect siblings to fight. That’s the frustrating part. They’re very irritating, and them grating on each other’s nerves isn’t fun to watch. Stacie feels especially cruel here, and I don’t like seeing her push around her sister all the time. Even when they work through their differences, I still don’t feel much for either of them. The rest of the cast is struggling to be interesting, but the two of them are the worst at it.
The characters are either boring or outright irritating, and they don’t go anywhere of interest.
Characters: 1/10
World Building
Since Perfect Christmas is set in the real world, there’s not much done to establish the world the characters are living in. It’s just America. There’s one exception to that though. The Tannenbaum Inn is a decent setting, but there’s not much to it. This is very obviously meant to be Santa’s workshop, and it’s not all that interesting. Christie sells it as the perfect place for a holiday, but it doesn’t feel like that in practice. Since so little time is spent there, it rings hollow.
Instead, much of the movie takes place in the snow. There’s not much going on in the snow either. It’s just… Snow. Since so little time is dedicated to the only location of note, the movie feels even slower as we shuffle through the snow and do little else. It’s boring.
The world building only drags down the already poor pacing, making the movie feel even slower.
World Building: 1/10
Themes
The theme of Perfect Christmas is that as long as you are with the people you love, any Christmas can be perfect. On its own, this theme is fine, but it feels very poorly executed given the poor cast of this movie. The characters do eventually learn this, yes, but only after getting on each other’s nerves throughout most of the film. They see what they have as positive, but at what cost? The theme isn’t brought to life well at all, largely because of the lackluster and frustrating characters.
Themes: 2/10
Production
Perfect Christmas feels like a step down in terms of animation. The animation reaches the point of distracting fairly frequently. It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the other movies that came out in the same year (those being Fairy Secret and Princess Charm School). Instead, it opts for something that’s trying to be realistic but ends up feeling uncanny. The eyes on Chelsea in particular are terrifying, and none of the hair looks great. Skipper’s is especially bad and clunky. The designs are all bad too, especially when Barbie wears a sleeveless dress in the middle of a snowstorm. None of it is any good.
The voice acting is decent, but Stacie and Chelsea’s voices don’t feel as good as they could. Playing young children is hard, yes, but their voices feel off a lot of the time. The transition in between the speaking and singing voices is very noticeable too. All of the singing actors are different from the speaking actors, and they don’t sound similar at all. Once again, it’s very distracting.
The music in this movie isn’t good either. Normally, having music is a plus to any Barbie movie, but here… The music is forgettable and doesn’t go anywhere. The music entirely disappears during the middle part of the movie too. The film advertises itself as a musical, but it really shouldn’t. The songs aren’t anything special, and if anything, they just feel like padding.
With poor animation and distracting voice acting, Perfect Christmas isn’t winning any awards for production.
Production: 2/10
Overall
Barbie: A Perfect Christmas is, in fact, not perfect. Its characters are poor, the production is clunky, and the story is slow and underbaked. If you’re looking for a movie to fall asleep to, this is a good place to start. Otherwise, if you’re searching for something like a Hallmark movie, just watch a Hallmark movie.
Overall: 1.6/10
Silly Superlative: Barbie movie with the most out of place cartwheels
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