Hannah Lux Davis Built the ‘Barbie World’ of Her Dreams, With Nicki Minaj’s Help

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is one of the most hotly anticipated films of the summer. Its shared release date with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (July 21) has become a meme of its own, with people all over the world claiming to be meticulously planning their day around a “Barbenheimer” release-day double feature.

One of the many, many things to be excited about this film is its soundtrack. The mere mention of it invites plenty of questions: Who is on it? Did Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” make the cut, despite Mattel’s litigious history with the group? Is Nicki Minaj, whose entire aesthetic is closely tied to Barbie, involved? Which other current and rising pop girls are getting their moment in Barbieland?

Now that most of the tracklist for Barbie’s soundtrack—including songs by Lizzo, Charli XCX, and Ken himself, Ryan Gosling—has been announced, we know that not only is Nicki Minaj a part of the soundtrack, but she’s joined by Ice Spice on a remix of the original “Barbie Girl.” The song, “Barbie World,” dropped last week as a single ahead of the film’s release, alongside a music video that same day.

As expected, the video for Minaj and Ice Spice’s “Barbie World” is a pink explosion, with tons of nods to and Easter eggs from the film as well as the Barbie brand in general. Bringing on director Hannah Lux Davis to spearhead the vision made sense—she has helmed plenty of other hugely popular, female-focused videos, like Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next,” Halsey’s “Nightmare,” and Charli XCX’s “Good Ones.”

“I had heard that they’re doing a whole slew of Barbie soundtrack music videos, and I wanted to get my hands on as many as I could,” Davis tells The Daily Beast over Zoom about creating her own version of the world of Barbie. “When I found out there was a Nicki-Ice Spice one, I obviously jumped at that.”

If you look through the catalog of Davis’ music videos, you’ll see three things very distinctly: huge pops of color, bright lighting, and female artists portrayed in ways both powerful and whimsical. The idea behind many of Davis’ videos is that these women can do it all in just three or four minutes.

Davis appears to use herself as inspiration, based on how tight the turnaround was for filming “Barbie World.”

“We shot the video on June 7,” she says; it premiered just two weeks later, on June 23. “It was a very effects-heavy video, so it’s a very quick turnaround on all aspects of it.” That included drawing storyboards, which Davis says “never happen for a music video,” as well as creating an animatic to help ensure they were staying on top of the vision throughout the production.

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That vision is made clear at the beginning of the video, which sees Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice playing with Barbie dolls based on themselves. “Those were dolls that Mattel made of Nicki and Ice Spice,” she says. “The girls got to pick their hair color, their hairstyles—you know, all the things. And then we had two little girls playing with them, which was really fun.”

At the end of the video, we see those little girls finally give the dolls the makeover. They’ve turned their bodies all askew and drawn on the dolls—a deliberate, subtle reference to one of the Barbies in the film: Kate McKinnon’s Barbie, who was played with a little too aggressively.

“I don’t know if everyone got that [reference],” Davis says of the dolls’ makeover-gone-wrong. “But it was a fun nod to the film with that character.”

“Barbie World” is filled with tiny nods like these. A very obvious one is based on a scene featured in the film’s first teaser; Nicki Minaj appears in the style of Margot Robbie’s Barbie, in a shot inspired by the opening sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of apes having a revelation in the presence of a monolith, in that Barbie teaser, little girls throw away their vintage dolls as they stand before Margot Robbie’s Barbie. In “Barbie World,” it's a bunch of Kens gawking at Nicki Minaj instead.

The props were significant too. The Barbie News newspaper that Nicki Minaj reads from, for example, is actually from the film. (If you look closely, the article after the headline—”This Is the Best Day Ever!”—is simply lots of tiny lines of hearts made to look like a sentence.) Other props lifted straight from Barbie are the binoculars that Ice Spice is holding in the shot where she’s sitting on a car and a chess board the women play with.

Davis and her crew got to work with the VFX house Framestore, which helped her create a limitless take on Barbieland. The studio also worked on the Barbie movie, meaning a lot of the digital elements and background from the film itself were also used for the video. It helped bring her video closer in line with Gerwig’s vision, which she loves.

“It’s a very beautiful world that Greta Gerwig and her team created—just really fantastical and pink and happy,” Davis says of what she appreciates about the film’s aesthetic. “Every day is a perfect day, you know, and I just really wanted to capture the essence of just the fun of it all.”

Referencing the various fantastical elements in the video—flying jet skis, pink clouds, a car driving on its own—Davis says she wanted her video to evoke the “anything goes” feeling that comes with playing with dolls. This quality of Barbie is inspiring to her, as well as its overall look. “It’s all never really been seen before, even though it’s referencing [the toys],” she says. “There was just a really fun, ‘anything is possible’ feeling to it that I wanted to make sure we captured [in the video],” Davis says.

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Davis didn’t get Gerwig’s input on the video during production, but she says the director reportedly “loved it and approved it.” But Gerwig’s film wasn’t the only inspiration for the design of “Barbie World.” “[“Barbie Girl”] was something we all watched as a point of reference,” she says, of Aqua’s music video from 1997. While Aqua isn’t featured here, Davis and her crew were eager to keep the Aqua magic in not just the remix, but also the accompanying visuals.

She also looked at the internet’s reaction to Barbie thus far, to add a meta-textual nod. That includes the hugely popular design-your-own Barbie poster generator. For days after the initial teasers were released, social media was also full of memes editing different characters into the poster format, making jokes about which kind of “Barbie” they would be. Davis knew she wanted to incorporate that into the video, and she did that with the video’s transitions; she even included a shot where Minaj and Spice appear to star in their own version of the now-iconic poster.

She also made sure to ask the stars of the video for their takes on what to add as well, considering that one of them was a huge fan of the brand herself. If you know anything about Nicki Minaj, you know that Barbie is a big part of her personal brand. (Her fans are literally called “Barbz.”) Naturally, Davis says, starring in this video was the role that Minaj was “born to do.”

“I presented Nicki with the concept, and she approved it, and we just worked together to make sure that it felt like the girls were having fun, because that was a big thing,” she says. Otherwise, getting Minaj in character was more about feeling the vibes. ”There wasn’t really anything too specific other than, you know, ‘pink.’ And that didn't even need to be explained, per se,” Davis explains. “[Minaj] fell into it pretty seamlessly, because it is such a familiar territory for her.”

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Even if “pink” doesn’t seem specific, it was a mandate that made the “Barbie World” shoot more personal for Davis. Viewers of her work often comment on the use of the color in her videos. That stems from her love for pink, she says.

“I am obsessed with the color pink, and there was a while where I would get a lot of shit on Twitter, like, ‘Your lighting is always so pink,’ or, ‘Your sets or your everything’s always so pink,’” she says, based on the aesthetic of some of her bigger videos. “Some fans of the [artists I worked with] didn’t seem to hop on board with that.”

But the recent popularity of Barbie’s hot-pink hues has turned viewers onto the color scheme they once rejected. “It’s funny, because now this video and Barbie in general are giving me permission to [use] pink.”

While there were so many things—and shades of pink—that she managed to fit into the music video, Davis says there is one thing she wished she could have included, but the crew wasn’t able to shoot it in time.

“Originally, the jet skis were going to be towing a pyramid of Kens,” she says. “They were going to be water skiing on a pyramid of Kens in their little board shorts and their perfect bods.”

Thankfully, Davis got something great in exchange: a chance to see her own name in the Barbie font in the credits. That was a sweet capper to the high-speed production, other than its main result: a video that captures the essence of the upcoming Barbie film, while also a work that feels fully her own. And just like every other bonkers marketing rollout from the Barbie camp so far, “Barbie World” just adds to our excitement for the film—because, as Nicki Minaj says, “it’s Barbie, bitch, if you’re still in doubt.”

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