“She was a perfect doll. Now she’s the real thing.”
Before there was Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie, there was Disney’s “Life-Size.” In a pink, damask-patterned, two-piece outfit and a fuzzy, frilly orange cardigan, supermodel Tyra Banks transformed into Eve, a “high-fashion doll” who becomes a “full-blown problem.”
“I’m Eve, and you’re my special friend!” Eve exclaims, startling mortified seventh-grader Casey Stuart, played by then-13-year-old actor Lindsay Lohan.
“Life-Size” follows young Casey, a tomboy and first-string quarterback with a penchant for mysticism, two years after her mother’s sudden death. Casey embarks on a mission to resurrect her mom using spells from “Holcroft’s Book of the Dead.”
Repeating the incantation — “zomba tarka ishtu nebarim” — she accidentally animates a doll gifted to her by Drew McDonald, a co-worker of her father’s who has a crush on him. Casey has until sunset four days later to reverse the spell, but she needs a different incantation from “Volume Two: The Book of Awakenings.”
Of course, Past Pages, the local bookstore that specializes in rare and unusual books, doesn’t have the second volume in stock. If Casey can’t snag it in time, Eve remains a human forever.
At face value, Eve seems like any run-of-the-mill doll — and a perennial pain in the neck for young Casey — but she could be the toy industry’s saving grace.
It’s the year 2000. The World Wide Web had become public domain just seven years before; the PlayStation 2 was released in March and the Apple iPod would be introduced the following year. According to the local “Kaboodles” toy store owner in “Life-Size,” dolls are fading into oblivion and losing relevance as “hi-tech” gadgets take over the new millennium.
“I don’t want a doll,” says a girl staring at a display window full of marked-down Eve dolls. “I want something with microchips.”
Fast forward to the “Barbie” trailer 23 years later, and a clique of tween girls tell Margot Robbie, “We haven’t played with Barbie since we were, like, 5 years old.”
Though Eve’s inception may have pulled notes from Mattel’s playbook, Disney’s “Life-Size” made the first attempt at merging a plastic world with the real one, using nostalgic whimsy as a vehicle for self-discovery and introspection.
“Life-Size” was the personification of many young girls’ wildest dreams. We coveted Eve’s ability to make any outfit look stylish, especially her signature pink and orange ensemble. We wished for an endless budget so that we could go on a shopping spree with our doll–turned-human as B*Witched’s “C’est La Vie” played in the department store. Moreover, it felt significant seeing a Black doll, albeit fictional, lauded as a cultural mainstay, depicted by a supermodel and broadcast by a household network such as ABC.
But as much as “Life-Size” tapped into escapism, it reinforced that imperfection — be it loss, grief or simply making mistakes — is an essential and beautiful part of the human experience. As Gerwig’s “Barbie” wrestles with mortality and fleeting innocence in the film’s trailer (asking her fellow Barbies and Kens gleefully, “Do you guys ever think about dying?!”), Eve grappled with what it means to be “the perfect doll.”
When Casey breathes life into Eve, she quickly becomes a fixture in Casey’s family, moving into the guest house that was formerly her mother’s art studio. While learning the ins and outs of society, she straddles the line between childlike naivety and sheer incompetence. Distracted by the novelty of the real world, Eve feels elated just to be alive.
“You know, Ben,” Eve says to Casey’s father, “even though I do so many things, my real purpose in life is to help girls. I strive to present a positive image of womanhood because I believe that girls everywhere should know that all things are possible.”
“Life-Size” tackles the criticism that Barbie has weathered for years over Mattel’s depiction of girlhood head-on. The 2023 iteration of the “Barbie” film “enacts” this endless debate, according to the Los Angeles Times, both advocating for and against the doll’s “good” or “bad” attributes.
For Eve, anything is possible. That is, until she ends up in the throes of the workforce. Far away from Sunnyvale, her fictional hometown “right smack dab in the middle of America,” Eve temps as a secretary working alongside Casey’s father at his law firm.
“Your previous position?” asks Ellen, the office manager.
“Sitting,” Eve replies, earning a deadpan glare from Ellen.
“I meant, where was your last job?”
“Oh! I was helping out with the space shuttle,” Eve says smiling, fully committed to the bit and delivering the line in earnest like a pageant queen.
In true doll fashion, Eve is an everywoman. In a past, plastic life, she’s been a massage therapist, police officer, doctor, office assistant and more, akin to President Barbie (Issa Rae), doctor Barbie (Hari Nef) and so on. In Robbie’s modern “Barbie,” we see the queen of everything, namely planning “giant blowouts,” and her universe orbits around her.
“It is the best day ever! So was yesterday, so is tomorrow and every day from now until forever!” she says in the trailer.
But that is until her own idea of perfection cracks. Her showers are now cold. She can no longer gracefully float down from her roof. Most importantly, Barbie’s feet have become flat. When Barbie Land begins to crumble — and her curiosity is piqued — Barbie is tasked with going to the Real World to learn the truth about the universe.
In “Life-Size,” the inverse occurred; Eve was excited to be in the real world until she realized that her work at home was not finished.
Eve is functionally illiterate, unable to read restaurant menus or write coherent words. After pretending to type for minutes, all that’s on her screen is a string of miscellaneous consonants. In the office copy room, papers fly around and machines erupt in chaos as Eve frantically tries to get things under control.
“Eve can handle anything!” she repeats to herself. Her can-do attitude is shredded, along with every other piece of paper. After breaking a nail, she cries, “I’m broken! I’m broken!” Confronted with the hardships of reality, Eve’s brazen confidence continues to erode, but her positivity and beauty distract most people from her ineptitude — except Casey.
Trying to take the place of her mother, Eve attempts to bake a cake for Casey. When she fails miserably, the two have a heart-to-heart conversation. The once-reluctant tween develops an understanding of why Eve behaves the way she does. Our favorite doll quickly realizes that being a human is not as fun as she once thought.
“But I’m a doll! Dolls are supposed to be perfect,” says Eve.
“Perfect is boring,” Casey retorts.
Casey explains that one’s humanity is not predicated on attaining some impossible level of perfection. Taking a page out of her mother’s book, she tells Eve that the most important thing is trying your very best — and gives Eve some tips to modernize her look. In the same breath, Eve tells Casey that her mother would want her to live fully, open up and welcome joy into her life rather than shutting people out.
Once she mends fences with Casey, Eve’s attention is drawn to the small television in her studio-turned-guest-room, where a newscaster is talking about the “disappointing sales figures” from the latest Eve doll release. Her manufacturer, Marathon Toys, is contemplating removing the doll from shelves, but Eve knows she has to revert back to being a doll and return to save Sunnyvale.
On the day of her championship football game, Casey tells Eve that she’s received an email that “Volume Two: The Book of Awakenings” is available at Past Pages. But Casey brushes it off since the two are now friends and Eve has truly become family.
But Eve struggles to tell Casey that her time in the real world is over and she has to save her beloved plastic world. Racing to Marathon Toys headquarters (similar to Barbie running through Mattel offices in the trailer) with Casey and Ben following behind her, Eve murmurs the incantation before sundown and says her final goodbyes.
The movie ends with Casey and Ben walking downtown past Kaboodles, watching new editions of the Eve doll fly off the shelves en masse. Young girls gleefully run around the bustling store with their “perfect” doll in hand, effectively signaling that the mission was successfully accomplished, thanks to Eve applying some of Casey’s notes.
A children’s movie made in the early 2000s, “Life-Size” was didactic, yes, but it set the tone for the doll-inspired movies to follow. As the new PG-13 “Barbie” film comes to the big screen, “Life-Size” is still not available on streaming, only DVD. But let us never forget the upcoming movie’s roots, and continue to remember Eve’s famous words: “Shine bright, shine far, be a star.”