Product Details

• Format: AC-3, Animated, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: August 22, 2010
• Run Time: 75 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001O3M370
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,115 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

BarbieTM Presents Thumbelina - a brand new tale with a classic character. Meet Barbie'sTM new friend, a tiny girl named Thumbelina, who lives in harmony with nature in the magical world of the TwillerbeesTM that's hidden among the wildflowers. At the whim of a spoiled young girl named Makena, Thumbelina and her two friends have their patch of wildflowers uprooted and are transported to a lavish apartment in the city. Here they learn of construction plans that threaten to destroy the land of the TwillerbeesTM! Harnessing the magic of nature, Thumbelina sets out to prove that even the smallest person can make a big difference. Directed by: Conrad Helten

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars WORST Barbie Movie...and I love Barbie Movies!, May 22, 2009

By 

Gill (Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barbie Presents Thumbelina (DVD)

I was so excitied to get the Thumbalina movie for my 4 - going on 5 year old. We both have grown to Love Barbie's Princess & the Pauper, Diamond Castle, etc. I was so excitied for a New Barbie Movie - as Diamond Castle was great! So I was expecting the same from Thumbalina movie...as I loved the Thumbalina story when I was young. Well, I was wrong!
First, this movie has nothing to do with the original Thumbalina...except for the name and it's a fairy. Second, this movie did not display the type of behavior I want my young lady watching. The girl in the movie is portrayed as a "spoiled Rich Brat" , who's parents give her anything she wants. They zone in on the fact that the girl and her two friends are very into high fashion...and have competition on who has the newest Name Brand Fashion item ( and I am not talking on the lines of Guess....rather Gucci). I find it very annoying that Barbie would want to expose young girls to this. Now, in their defense, Thumbalina helps turn the bratty girl into caring about the forest...but seriously they spent so much time showing the bratty rich snobby girls judging each other so much...I felt the damage was already done. I could see this movie may be better for 13 age - as they are aware of cliches, and catty girls. Now the enviromental message in this movie is not a strong one. You could teach your child more, by planting a tree or garden. The sad part is that this dvd is literally going in the trash. I don't even want to recycle it.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good and Bad, April 27, 2009

By 

Shadomega (Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barbie Presents Thumbelina (DVD)

This movie is drastically different from the other Barbie movies. They are trying to do their good deed by making a movie with an environmental message. This appears to be a calculated move from a marketing standpoint, rather than genuine concern for the environment since the only effort Mattel has made is with the items associated with this movie (recylced packaging for the toys, etc.). Nothing makes blatant commercialism stand out like a sore thumb like trying to package it as anti-commercialism. We all know that the Barbie movies are commercials for their toys (like the TV cartoons we grew up with), but as parents we've tolerated it with the Barbie movies because they've so far done alright at putting good moral lessons into them and making them relatively entertaining. This movie is not on the same level as the previous movies in a few ways. The writing, particularly in the dialog department, is very weak and stilted. They have built everything around their obviously half-hearted attempt at "doing a good deed for the environment" and it shows in that every element involved in the "green theme" is poorly executed. The dialog in these parts is atrocious, cringe-worthy jargon. It sounds more like a cheap PSA than movie dialog. The premise is horribly flawed that they would be trying to build a factory so far out of the way that they have to attack a field of flowers that nobody ever goes to. That they transplant a section of the flowers from the field to Makena's room using an excavator (and apparently so quickly and cleanly that the twillerbees inside have no idea where they are or what has happened) is positively laughable. I've had more to explain to my daughters of how things wouldn't happen the way they depicted in this movie than any other Barbie movie, and we have all but the Diaries and Fairytopia ones.

The animation is not up to par on this movie either, and I suspect it is because they are trying to churn out more movies this year than any previous year. They seem to have caught on that the movies are very effective at selling toys, so they're trying to hit us with a non-stop barrage. What happens then is that they are trying to slap these things together in maybe a quarter of the amount of time they used to have. Thus now the lifelike characters move like hollow rubber tubes, and the main characters aren't even attempted to look lifelike. Oddly enough, they look like the Sweet Streets dolls from Fisher Price... I also noticed several times during the movie that the image will pixellate and become grainy, so the finish is seriously lacking. Also noteworthy is the small role Kelly Sheridan has been playing lately. She got to mostly sit out of Mariposa, Christmas Carol, and Thumbelina and only had a starring role in the Diamond Castle movie.

I guess I've been lucky about the brattiness of the girls in this movie, as my daughters have not tried to emulate them. In fact the only comment I've received so far is my oldest asking "Why doesn't she say anything other than 'Ch-ya'?" which has given me the opportunity to point out that she doesn't have anything valuable to add so she just says something stupid. I also point out at the end that her part was so insignificant that nobody is credited for her. Frankly I thought the part was hillarious as a representation of the stupid things snobby people will say when they can't just be silent, but that is beside the point since I'm old enough to not be influenced by cartoons.

All of this aside, I will say that the weird looking characters can grow on you. Usually I like the villain characters in the Barbie movies because they tend to ham things up and totally upstage the heroic characters (particularly Martin Short's Preminger- classic!), but in this one, I think Thumbelina's ditzy friend, Chrysella steals a lot of scenes. Also the construction workers (not counting the crazy foreman) provided a few good laughs, although they would have a hard time keeping a job with the way they spend most of their time eating lunch and smelling the flowers. A good crew would have had the job of blading the ground done before lunch on the first day. Poor little pixies would never have known what hit them... All in all, the depiction of construction workers was pretty bad showing them to be lazy and more than a little weak in the head, and the foreman was the primary villain. In that respect, the environmental message skews the story into the very turbulent waters of over-generalization. It reminded me of a book that was just banned from the schools for trying to generalize Loggers as evil polluting critter killers. They tried to soften it by making it only the foreman who is really trying to tear the place up, but by doing that they made doofuses out of the workers. Way to go guys. Some kids watching this may have parents who work in construction, or other relatives, and now they are going to have to explain to these kids that they don't go around trying to destroy pixie homes... Does it also need to be pointed out that there is plenty of good that can be said in favor of green practices and environmental causes without having to involve magic and make-believe situations (which only dillute the message)? Since there aren't any pixies in the homeless shelters, trying to save their habitat is kind of pointless, you think?

This movie is mildly amusing and my daughters enjoy it immensely, but I think it has the worst dumbed-down plot of all of them. The parts about understanding what true friendship is are good, and that goes back to what most of the Barbie movies are good at, self-esteem stories. They need to stick to those motifs if they're going to do rush jobs on these movies.

And if you think this one was bad, the next one features four Barbies riding horses in mini-skirts waving swords around. That ought to get all of us parents up in arms!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great; a nice change, March 20, 2009

By 

jillybug - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barbie Presents Thumbelina (DVD)

My four-year-old and her friends LOVE this movie (my 2 1/2 year old, too), and while I have to agree that the snobbish attitudes of the rich girls aren't my favorite, overall, I liked the show and thought it was a nice change from the many Barbie movies that have an evil "villain" character in them. True, it's not really the story of Thumbelina, but it's a cute, refreshing story, not scary at all for little ones, and I quite enjoyed it myself, for what it is. I recommend it.