13 mind-bending doll movies that paved the way for ‘Barbie’

She sings! She dances! She protects her owner with the ferocity (and gait) of a mother wolf! Three decades after the original Child’s Play, M3GAN resurrected the killer-doll movie for the AI era, dialling down the gore and cranking up the camp to produce a viral hit that’s surely going to spawn a trillion sequels. (The next one is already in pre-production.) M3GAN herself is a creation straight out of the uncanny valley, an unsettling mix of Teddy Ruxpin and the girl from Orphan. And yet, you still come away wanting one for yourself. We can change her, we swear!

Only the most materialistic decade in history could produce a movie about a guy wanting to bang a department store mannequin. In fairness, when said mannequin comes to life – because it’s possessed by the soul of an ancient Egyptian woman, see – it looks and acts like Kim Cattrall. Many critics considered Mannequin the nadir of ’80s film comedy, but it exists today in that Weekend at Bernie’s sphere as a concept so patently absurd it says something about the era in which it was created. Specifically, that everyone was doing way too much cocaine. 

Before M3GAN, there was Chucky, a seemingly innocent My Buddy doll knockoff with a smart mouth and a violent streak – only in this case, his taste for murder is more a feature than a bug, owing to being possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. A two-foot-tall knife-wielding ginger in red overalls is an inherently funny image, and subsequent franchise instalments would lean hard into camp. But the original functions as an effective straight-up slasher flick, striking a balance between winking humour and legit scares that would elude the sequels.

Any entry in the beloved Pixar franchise could fit on this list, but it’s the third movie where the series’ themes of friendship, forgiveness and letting go reach their emotional high point. Also, it’s the one that has the highest concentration of actual toys in it, as Andy’s longtime playthings come to grips with his impending adulthood and decide to spend retirement in a daycare centre – which turns out to be a big mistake. It also has a romantic subplot between Barbie and Ken dolls in case Greta Gerwig’s version isn’t sufficiently enchanting.

No shade on Disney’s original adaptation, which is still the best movie of the company’s Golden Era, but Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion retelling of the Carlo Collodi novel is a fantasia all its own. (We’ll shade the live-action remake all day, though.) It’s still ultimately about a childless carpenter who carves a surrogate son that miraculously comes to life. But where Walt Disney brightened the book’s darker elements, del Toro dims them further, setting the story in Mussolini’s Italy and transforming the classic morality play into a poignant – and visually stunning – antifascist parable.  

Met with mixed reviews and disappointing box-office receipts, director Joe Dante’s action-comedy about two factions of artificially intelligent toys who go to war in suburban America nonetheless has a cult of admirers who insist it’s an underrated classic. Indeed, it’s got a subversive spirit not far off from Gremlins, Dante’s iconic creature feature, and some typically awesome Stan Winston puppetry, though not as much as Dante would’ve liked – he claims the studio cheaped out and used CGI for the majority of the effects. It’s one movie that could benefit from a remake, and indeed one was planned a few years ago before Disney canned it.

The first spinoff of the now sprawling The Conjuring-verse focused on the breakout star of the first film, the haunted antique doll known as Annabelle – which, it should be noted, is based on an actual haunted doll encountered by Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life paranormal investigators who inspired the whole series. It’s certainly creepy, all porcelain-skinned and rosy-cheeked, with disproportionately huge eyes. Really, if you’re making a movie about a possessed doll, a good design will carry half the weight, but like its predecessor, Annabelle has enough well-timed scares to justify its existence. 

Is it safe to say this Disney TV movie, about a beautiful dress-up doll that comes to life, is the original Barbie? No, absolutely not. But they’re at least spiritual cousins. Lindsay Lohan, fresh from The Parent Trap, is a young girl dealing with the sudden death of her mother. While trying to bring her back to life using a magic spell, she accidentally turns her doll, named Eve, into a flesh-and-blood human, played by Tyra Banks. It’s your basic ‘fish out of water’ comedy, like 13 Going on 30, with a bit of The Little Mermaid thrown in, but Lohan flashes the talent that signalled a big future before, y’know, everything else happened.

In 2000, photographer Mark Hogancamp was viciously attacked outside a bar in upstate New York. Suffering significant memory loss, he turned to an unusual form of therapy: he began constructing a tiny fictional Belgian village in his backyard and populating it with dolls. One of the true standouts of the 2010s documentary boom, director Jeff Malmberg approaches Hogancamp and his curious project with immense empathy. Avoid the saccharine Robert Zemeckis movie it inspired – the true story is moving enough. 

Its title would probably be considered cancellable today, but Frank Oz’s take on the beloved children’s book by Lynne Reid Banks remains a wondrous paean to cultural understanding (even if it still indulges in a few broad stereotypes). If you were in school in the ’80s and ’90s, you know the story: young Omri is gifted an antique cupboard for his birthday, which he soon discovers makes his toys – including a Native American figurine – come to life. It was eclipsed by that other movie about the secret life of toys that came out in 1995, and hasn’t overtaken the book in the cultural imagination, but it’s a charming adaptation regardless.   

Overshadowed in the memory of cult-film aficionados by the similarly minded – if much schlockier – Puppet Master franchise, Stuart Gordon’s killer dolls flick is ‘horror’ in the Brothers Grimm sense of the term. A group of strangers end up stranded at an isolated house populated by an elderly couple and dozens of hand-crafted dolls. As the guests are picked off one by one, it soon becomes clear who’s doing the offing, and it ain’t the old folks. It sounds like a typically cheap cash-grab from the video nasty era, and it’s indeed very low-budget, but it has a fairy tale atmosphere, and there’s more on its mind than pure shock.

The single joke of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s feature film debut is ‘What if the bear from the Snuggle commercial smoked weed, got drunk, hung out with Mark Wahlberg and swore a lot?’ It’s not everyone’s favourite brand of humour, but it certainly is for a lot of folks, as Ted was one of the year’s biggest box-office hits, spawning a sequel and an upcoming TV series. In terms of ‘inanimate toy comes to life’ movies, it’s perhaps Barbie’s polar opposite, so if you’re in the market for a true alternative, have at it.    

Anthony Hopkins is a deeply damaged magician whose ventriloquist dummy, a truly disturbing wooden facsimile named Fats, may or may not be developing a mind of its own. It sounds like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and indeed it bears many similarities to the Cliff Robertson episode ‘The Dummy.’ But Hopkins is genuinely disturbing in the role, and the design of Fats alone will haunt your dreams.