Barbie: Video Game Hero is a movie in the Barbie series. It was released in January 2017. It is also the final Barbie movie to date to be released to home media before all succeeding movies switched to Netflix exclusives.
Barbie loves to code and program her own video games, but Chelsea isn't one for following rules. When Barbie is magically transported inside the game she's creating, she meets Cutie, an Exposition Fairy, and Bella, the roller-skating princess—and the virtual world needs real-life help.
A virus is causing trouble in the game, and Barbie must progress through the game level-by-level to defeat it. When she's limited by the game's ruleset, Barbie must take a cue from Chelsea and code outside the box to win!
This movie contains examples of:
- Animesque: The first Barbie movie to directly invoke this.
- Annoying Video Game Helper: In-universe, Cutie is seen as annoying due to his status as the tutorial which is extraneous to the game's NPC's. It gets deconstructed when his loneliness led him to accidentally make the virus.
- Art Shift:
- Each level in the game is done in a different style. The racing game is close to Barbie's normal style, the Match-Three Game is done like Funko Pop toys, and the sandbox-style game is done in the style of Minecraft.
- Crystal, who's native to the second level, maintains her Super-Deformed look even when the other characters turn back into realistic-looking versions.
- Big Bad: The virus, who wants control of the game.
- Clueless Aesop: The moral message of the movie is that you shouldn't let yourself feel confined to one path and think outside the box, and Barbie gains the means to basically code a whole new game from the inside, which leads her to victory. In real video games you do have to stay within the confines of whatever limits the programmers put in, and can't 'follow new paths' without cheating, glitching the game, or worse.
- The Corruption: The virus corrupts friendly programs and makes them malicious.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Barbie remembers Chelsea's complaints about wanting to play the game her way as inspiration to change the goal of the final level.
- Token White: As the game is Japanese, Barbie is this to the game characters.
- Hime Cut: Maia's hair is this, although the back is tied in buns.
- I Work Alone: Since they were just created to compete with the player, none of the game characters understand the idea of helping others until Barbie explains it to them. They don't even know how to pronounce "team".
- Mr. Exposition: Cutie the cloud is the in-game tutorial and tells Barbie the objective for each stage.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- In level 2, Kris and Bella try to throw Barbie a speed power-up... but it bounces off a tree and hits the enemy squirrels, speeding them up.
- Cutie accidentally created the virus out of a desire for friends.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Cutie is particularly upset about something, he may stop rhyming.
- Product Placement: Besides Barbie herself, her favorite game is Just Dance. Later, she rewrites the final level as a Just Dance game.
- Reality Warper: Barbie gains code that lets her rewrite the game from inside it, leading to this.
- Rhymes on a Dime: Cutie speaks almost entirely in rhyme.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Everyone becomes this in levels 2 and 3 due to the chibi art style.
- Save the Princess: Level 2 has Barbie save Crystal, a girl trapped in a tree house, by matching three gems.
- Stylistic Suck: The video game segments have deliberately choppy animation at times to reinforce the fact that it's a game.
- Trapped in TV Land: Barbie gets trapped in the video game she was working on and has to help save it.
- Two Girls to a Team: Inverted. Kris and Cutie are the only male members of the team.
- Unwinnable by Design: The bonus level is designed to be unwinnable, as Gaia and Maia are programmed to go at super speed and always win. Barbie wins by essentially hacking the game, though considering that she did so using nothing but what she obtained in the game itself through regular gameplay the method she used is likely the correct way to win the bonus level.
- Zerg Rush: The virus's main form of attack is to rush the players with sheer numbers.
