The Beanie Bubble film review — 1990s toy craze story is far from understuffed

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Where once lumbered the earnest Hollywood docudrama, there now flourishes a fleeter beast — the flip fictionalised exposé. It’s a painless, sugar-coated approach to complex topics, and equally effective — some would argue, equally superficial — whether it tackles economics (The Big Short), politics (Vice) or true crime (American Hustle). Now The Beanie Bubble examines the shenanigans behind a singular phenomenon in recent US commerce: a line of pocket-sized soft toys that in the late 1990s became as avidly sought after as tulips in 17th-century Holland.

Directed by Kristin Gore, who scripted, and Damian Kulash, The Beanie Bubble recounts the bizarre trading boom in Beanie Babies, the plush animals made by the Ty toy company. Based on Zac Bissonnette’s book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, the film suggests that the craze was a classic example of American something-for-nothing fever — it ends by making comparisons with cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

While company founder Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis) was the public face of the business — and, the film contends, a neurotically clueless self-promoter — the film is really about three women and their role in the Babies’ success. Renamed for this account, the women are Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), who becomes Warner’s domestic and business partner; later fiancée Sheila (Succession’s Sarah Snook), whose young daughters help inspire the toys; and Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a college-age employee who becomes the company’s under-appreciated and underpaid marketing genius.

The female leads are terrifically zestful and nuanced, with Viswanathan especially striking as the clued-up young powerhouse behind the toys’ success, down to writing the little rhymes on their labels (her role is based on real-life ecommerce pioneer Lina Trivedi). The broad comic content comes from Galifianakis as a needy, narcissistic man-boy with big glasses, slicked coif and luxuriant bulk, a look that suggests Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko if he had believed that missing lunch was for wimps.

A breezy feminist demolition of self-made-man mythology, The Beanie Bubble is marred by clunky ironic retrospection, based on showing its characters unschooled in the internet or excited about this new thing called “ePort? eBay!”. The toys’ selling point was that they were “understuffed” to make them adorably floppy, but no one could call the film understuffed: it is dense with incident and highly intricate.

The story is told in the first person, alternating the women’s accounts, with a time scheme that zigzags between the 1980s and 1990s, craftily working towards the three narratives’ intersection. In other words, while the film has the candy-coloured pop-culture appeal of Barbie, it displays the structural complexity of Oppenheimer — a useful consideration if you still can’t get tickets for either.

★★★☆☆

On Apple TV+ from July 28