Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus (2005)

Princess Annika skates on forbidden ice, adopts a polar bear cub, and refuses a sorcerer's hand in marriage, which promptly petrifies her entire village. This is the sixth entry in the Barbie film series and the first built from wholly original material, a distinction the studio presumably regarded as a gamble. The result plays as a brisk, brightly colored fairy tale about a winged horse who is secretly a sister, a wand assembled from courage, love, and ice, and a wizard who has already turned three previous wives into trolls. It is a confection, and it knows it.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a near-total blank. Annika is headstrong, she declines an unwanted suitor, and she rescues her family, which registers as a faint pulse of feminine agency. Yet the machinery around her is the oldest kind: a princess, a quest, a marriage plot resolved by a blacksmith with good cheekbones. The cast is uniformly pale and unremarked upon. No character contends with race, with sexuality, with wealth as a system, or with the body as a site of judgment. The polar bear cub exists to be adorable, not to mourn a melting ice cap. A greedy trader appears, cheats, and is transformed into a doormat, which is a punishment for dishonesty, not a critique of commerce.

The film also declines to lecture. It tells its story, resolves its spells, and lifts a wand into the sky to become a star. There is no sermon, no lesson appended to the closing frame, no sense that the audience is being graded on its virtue. In 2005 this was unremarkable. Viewed from the present, it reads as a relic of a gentler commercial instinct, a toy advertisement with a Haydn score and a Brie Larson power ballad. We classify it without complaint. It asks nothing of us, and we ask little of it.