Take a shot for every character that understands animals.Īgain, this is a really specific one. Something very similar to this happens in EVERY SINGLE MOVIE! I think they actually fell in love once! And it never comes back! I guess the idea is to hit the talking animal button to appeal to demographics, or maybe to introduce the intelligence of the non-human characters, but it never comes back and never has impact on the plot. And once that cat shows up, it finds a dog, and the cat and dog don't get along, or maybe do, but they know what the other is saying while none of the humans can. There's always, like, a cat or something that shows up. Take a shot for the forced subplot of the animal interactions, two shots if it's romantic. This one is super specific to The Princess and the Popstar, but I felt like it should be included. Take a shot if someone spontaneously starts dancing for no apparent reason and with much better choreography and accuracy than they realistically would have. It had magical abilities, but it wasn't shown why it had magical abilities. A good example of this would be the paintbrush in Barbie as Rapunzel. In Barbie Movies, however, the magical thing is used as an Anti-Deus ex Machina, stimulating conflict rather than ending it with no explanation as to why it exists. Basically, introducing some element to the story with no foreshadowing to get your characters out of an immediate problem. Otherwise, this is referred to as a Deus ex Machina, Greek for God out of the Machine. It's fine if you have magic in your story to resolve a conflict, it's always fine and dandy, but if you do, you need to explain it. Take a shot for a magic thing that shows up and is never explained thoroughly. Sometimes this can be attributed to motion of the camera instead of model animation, in an attempt to create a cinematic feel the walking looks unnatural, this can be counted here as well. The dancing never looks weird, it's just the walk cycles that do. The strange thing is, these movies are often musicals, which requires the characters to dance. Ever since, it always feels weird when they walk. The animation quality in these films has never been particularly up to snuff, especially on the earlier ones in the late 2000's. Take a shot for an awkward looking walk cycle. OK, I'm giving it an acronym, the BAFDG! No, that's too awkward. I may need to explain my reasoning for some of these, so this is also a cumulative review of all of the movies in the franchise. These films really are something to behold in their own weird way. Do you want to get really really drunk? Or, if you're under age where you live, do you want a lot of orange juice in one sitting? Well, look no further! Here I present the Barbie Animated Film Drinking Game, the most cliche series of direct-to-DVD films made since Disney started making sequels in the 90's! I used to be a fan of this franchise, and I'm not ashamed to admit that.