This film­mak­er used Bar­bie dolls to sto­ry­board her debut feature

Bar­bie is gain­ing momen­tum in the film indus­try. Not only is there a Gre­ta Ger­wig direct­ed movie in the works, the icon­ic doll also plays a piv­otal role in the new LGBT+ dra­ma My Fiona.

Kel­ly Walker’s film – orig­i­nal­ly due to pre­mière at BFI Flare – beau­ti­ful­ly por­trays the messy grief of pro­tag­o­nist Jane (Jeanette Maus) fol­low­ing her best friend’s sui­cide. It couldn’t be fur­ther from the impos­si­bly pro­por­tioned Amer­i­can fash­ion doll and the het­ero­nor­ma­tive life she represents.

Yet Bar­bie helped Walk­er over­come her num­ber one chal­lenge when work­ing on the sto­ry­board for her film: not being able to draw. ​“When I start­ed draw­ing it, I got to three pan­els, and I was like, ​‘Oh, this is ter­ri­ble,’” she tells LWLies.

Grow­ing up, Walk­er col­lect­ed Bar­bi­es with her moth­er, so when she start­ed look­ing for mod­els for the sto­ry­board, her beloved dolls seemed like the most nat­ur­al choice. With her 200-strong Bar­bie col­lec­tion back home in Aus­tralia, Walk­er had to resort to pri­vate ven­dors in Los Angeles.

“A woman sold me these Bar­bi­es out of the trunk of her car in a garbage bag,” she explains. ​“It felt like a drug deal.” Forty dol­lars and sev­en dolls lat­er, Walker’s work on the so-called ​‘Bar­bie board’ began. ​“I set up a stu­dio in my house. I wore white gloves so I could Pho­to­shop my hands out of the pic­tures. It was about a month full of work to the point where I was cry­ing by the end of it because I thought I had got­ten myself into too big of a job.”

But she wouldn’t have had it any oth­er way. ​“I’d still do it because I got to under­stand the sto­ry. It’s almost like I got to do a run-through of how the film was going to look and feel.”

For Walk­er, who also wrote the script for My Fiona, Bar­bi­es were a way to bring ​“joy and lev­i­ty” into a deeply per­son­al movie. ​“The sto­ry comes from per­son­al expe­ri­ences, which is very emo­tion­al, espe­cial­ly get­ting into pro­duc­tion and see­ing those scenes being played out in front of you in audi­tions. Bar­bi­es rep­re­sent such a beau­ti­ful part of my child­hood that they almost took away all that emo­tion that I con­nect­ed to the sto­ry. I need­ed that in order to be an effi­cient director.”

Walk­er plans on using Bar­bi­es for future projects, too, sim­pli­fy­ing the process to make it less time-con­sum­ing. She’s poised to co-direct Pur­ple Mar­tins, a film about two Amish sis­ters writ­ten with Bian­ca Beck. The lat­ter will be in charge of sewing ​“lit­tle Amish out­fits for the Bar­bie dolls.” Walk­er has also writ­ten an Audrey Hep­burn biopic and hopes to one day acquire the high­ly col­lec­table Audrey Bar­bi­es for that storyboard.

Walk­er says that she’s ful­ly aware of how prob­lem­at­ic Bar­bi­es were before their recent inclu­sive rebrand, but stress­es she nev­er saw the dolls as any­thing oth­er than a tool to tell sto­ries with. ​“What I’m attract­ed to in sto­ry­telling is female rela­tion­ships,” Walk­er con­cludes, ​“whether that be friend­ship or sis­ter­hood.” As Mattel’s own web­site puts it, ​“Bar­bie has always offered girls choic­es and end­less sto­ry­telling possibilities.”

Due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, this year’s BFI Flare has moved online. Find out more at bfi​.org​.uk/​flare, and check #BFI­FlareAtH­ome for announce­ments of new fes­ti­val titles added to BFI Player.