We haven’t played with Barbies since we were, like, five years old,” a group of teens tell Margot Robbie’s Barbie in the film trailer. Her face falls. If girls don’t need Barbie, what does she exist for? And who (or what) do they turn to instead? What happens to a girl to make her abandon what was previously such a source of enrichment? What does it mean to age, when Barbie herself cannot? 6) It’s about ... Barbie. Because it’s 'Barbie,' the instinct is to go to something a little Euro and sugary, and that’s just never what I do," he told Vanity Fair. Coaxing great ideas out of pop stars is familiar territory for Ronson, but his instrumental score for the film, co-composed with Wyatt, was his first such project — and he admits that making it work meant stifling some of his usual instincts. We can’t talk about Barbie without talking about the marketing of Barbie. It is everywhere: on Krispy Kreme donuts and Ruggable rugs and OPI nail polish and GAP T-shirts and toothbrushes and luggage and pool floats and ice cream and frozen yogurt and makeup and cars and blankets and hairbrushes and heels. Her Dreamhouse is on Airbnb. Every publicist pushing sunglasses or sex toys has retooled their strategy around “Barbiecore” for the summer. I have never worn so much pink in my life.

Because Andrew sang on the demo and he has such an amazing range, I thought, OK, let me make this a little bit easier for Ryan — lower it a key or two. As Ryan started to warm up, I was like, OK, we could kind of bump this up another key. Oh, now we can bump it [to] the original key — he's just giving this wonderful vocal performance. And also, because he's such an incredible actor, he's imbuing all these words with a different context and emotion than what Andrew and I had even been able to to add to it. It felt like he was inhabiting the song, which is really wonderful. We’d show artists little scenes that we thought would give them the best sense of the film — you know, either we’d sit on these zooms and we have a super-private, secure server or occasionally we’d get them in a screening room and give them a really good idea of where we wanted their song to be or whose voice they’d be speaking from and the emotion of the story they’re telling. These artists are all like super clever and great lyricists, so we really were spoiled —like, a week or two later, “Hey, what do you guys think of this?” And it would just be incredible. The release date for "Barbie: The Album" is set for July 21, the same day the film premieres. What is 'Barbie: The Album (Best Weekend Ever Edition)'? No, and I think you’ll see why if you see the film. It starts kitsch, because it’s obviously setting up this world, and it’s very like “Barbie’s perfect day,” but so much of the movie is beautiful and deep and offers so many existential questions about life. And that’s where I saw some parallels to like things like “The Truman Show.” It’s poignant but it’s still light. And scoring a film, you watch certain scenes ad nauseam —I’ve seen Margot Robbie break up into tears like a million times, and every time she gets me, Ryan too. There’s something about these performances, this balance of comic and pathos. It’s just wonderful the whole way along.

Ava Max

Young girls] are “funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig told Vogue in May. “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.” It’s clear that a big chunk of Barbie’s aim is to explore why girls abandon not only their Barbie dolls, but some of the positive beliefs associated with them. Where are you at with the memoir and solo album we spoke about last year? Are they both about your days coming up in the New York club scene of the ‘90s? It’s a “Barbie World,” and we’re all just living in it! On Sunday, July 9, Hollywood’s biggest and brightest stars descended upon the pink carpet for the world premiere of Barbie. Directed by Academy Award nominee Greta Gerwig, Barbie features acclaimed performances from Margot Robbie (Barbie), Ryan Gosling (Ken), Issa Rae (President Barbie), Dua Lipa (Mermaid Barbies), Will Ferrell (the CEO of Mattel) and Helen Mirren (the narrator), among others. For months, the Barbie movie’s vast unknown has been one of its greatest assets. What little we understood amounted to a pair of highlighter-yellow rollerblades, dangled aloft by the spray-tanned arms of a bleached-blond Ryan Gosling: nostalgic, symbolic, a triumph of marketing honed along a (plastic) razor’s edge. Every new set photo, character poster, and teaser trailer that collected over the months leading up to Barbie’s July 21 release has been received and dissected with the self-serious thrill of an 8-year-old planning their themed birthday party. Which, to be clear, is exactly as it should be. Questioning Barbie, like assembling an identity as a child, is a necessary pursuit. This is what movies like Barbie—and icons like the doll herself—are made for: both the indulgent pleasure and the outrageous nuance of mythologizing. He continued, saying he wrote something "definitely disco ... and definitely gold and sequin-y, but it’s got a really tough driving thing to it."

I’d done scenes here and there, but I’d never scored an entire film. I don’t think anybody knew how musically driven this film was going to be when we started. The movie is kind of kitsch personified — it’s not like the vibe of your “Late Night Feelings” album and some of the more serious things you’ve done. Was that a challenging transition to make? Barbie The Album executive producer Mark Ronson and award-winning actress Grace Gummer attend the world premiere of Barbie. And that's what's so great about a lot of the songs that people wrote, because they seem so bespoke," Ronson says. "It was just so wonderful to see how every artist took what they saw, took the conversation with Greta, and everyone ran with it and did something different."Here’s what we know for sure: In Barbie, our protagonist finds herself losing her grip over her inherent Barbie-ness. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” she asks during one of her classic blowout parties, earning stunned, judgment silence in response. Dolls don’t die! Matters only worsen from there: Suddenly, her fake shower is freezing; she falls, rather than floats, from her rooftop into her convertible; her feet slump from their iconic arch. To remedy this imperfection, she’s instructed to explore the “real world,” so she can know “the truth about the universe.” The acoustic-style guitar has a detachable pink strap that matches its body and is perfect for practice or performance.