Barbie's evolution is more abstract than Bella's; Barbie's adolescence begins with her doubts, shyness and thoughts of death. Her hero's journey is her quest from her fantasy game world to the real world, where she hopes to find Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the girl who used to play with her. Although Barbie locates her, she realizes that Sasha is not the cause of her recent changes. Barbie is psychologically linked to the girl's mother, Gloria (América Ferrera), a Mattel employee whose thoughts about cellulite and death carried over to Barbie in Barbieland.
Barbie is the bridge between mother and daughter, embodying Sasha's abandoned childhood and Gloria's adult thoughts. It's situated between two generations of women who at first feel disconnected in their politics, as when Sasha brutally reduces Barbie as not the symbol of female empowerment she thinks she is, but an anti-feminist consumer product that damages girls' self-image. But Sasha, Gloria and Barbie reach common ground in all the ways society oppresses, represses, silences and limits women.
An important step in Barbie's awakening, and ultimately her transition to becoming not just a doll but a real woman in the real world, is her encounter with the ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), co-founder of Mattel and creator of Barbie. . Handler tells Barbie that he named her and Ken after her children, and Barbie even takes Handler's last name when she travels back to the real world to stay.
Motherhood is not Barbie's solution. But her discovery of a mother figure and her relationship with Gloria and Sasha also lead her to a place of new agency. In this sense, motherhood is less about literal children than about which notions of female autonomy are passed down from generation to generation and which fail to do so.
In other words, these stories are also about a feminist lineage. Both Bella and Barbie are able to fully construct and understand their identities when they step outside of the patriarchy and gain access to their inner daughter and inner mother. The point of both stories is that a woman's freedom is beyond the clear roles that society would exclusively prescribe to her, whether daughter, wife or mother. To be a free woman, like Bella or Barbie, is to be free from definitions or, rather, to be free to define herself.
