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This Easter, a new movie based on Sylvanian Families will be released into cinemas. If you’ve been keeping up with films based on toys for the last decade or so, then you’ll be forgiven for feeling a modicum of dread upon hearing this news. Because ever since Barbie took a billion dollars and found itself nominated for a bunch of Oscars, a toy movie isn’t allowed to be a toy movie any more. It has to be an auteur-driven toy movie; one that also functions as a commentary about the capitalist machinations that drive the toy industry.
It’s everywhere. In 2022, Emily V Gordon and Jon M Chu announced that they were making a Play-Doh movie that would be about “creativity, imagination, and the purpose of art”. JJ Abrams is making a film based on Hot Wheels that he describes as “emotional and grounded and gritty”. A24 is making a Barney the Dinosaur film said to be heavily influenced by the work of Charlie Kaufman. These are all real things that are actually happening.
And so, given all this, your stomach probably lurched at the prospect of something similar happening to Sylvanian Families. After all, very few things are quite as pure as Sylvanian Families. For the uninitiated, these are small toys made out of flocked plastic. Each toy is of a different woodland creature, prim and conservatively dressed. They are dainty and timeless and easy to love. When the UK’s only dedicated Sylvanian Families shop closed down in 2023, it felt like nothing but the death of innocence itself.
The last thing that any of us needed was a film about Sylvanian Families that offered viewers a meta-critique of the Sylvanian Families brand. No edgy jokes about their lack of genitals. No social commentary about the toys being shaken out of their pristine comfort by class war or looming environmental disaster or the rise of rightwing populism. The only thing that anyone really wants from a Sylvanian Families movie is a lot of scenes of the Sylvanian Families acting like the Sylvanian Families.
Reader, they understood the assignment. “Will Freya find a lovely birthday gift for her mummy?” asks the recently released trailer, “And will she succeed in choosing the tree of the year?” And that’s it. That’s the entire film. A little girl has to buy a birthday present for her mother, and then adequately judge a tree competition. Read that again. Doesn’t it feel nice?
True, there are moments in the Sylvanian Families trailer that flirt with the kind of subversion we’ve grown used to. In one scene a young rabbit is about to bring a hammer down on a nail she’s holding in her other hand. In any other toy film, you could put money on her smashing her fingers up. But not here. Also, there’s a sequence where a character plays the saxophone, an instrument that brings dangerous connotations of jazz and sex. And yet she plays it, and it sounds nice, and nothing bad happens.
In fact, aside from a relatively loud noise that plays 28 seconds in, the trailer is as peaceful and charming as the toy itself. It’s so faithful to the source material, in fact, that at times it seems like the entire film was made by people just moving some Sylvanian Families toys around with their hands, as a child might. Honestly, given everything happening in the world, the trailer feels like a warm 70-second bath for your brain.
Then again, perhaps it’s easy to overstate the influence of auteur toy films on the wide market. The sincere Sylvanian Families-style films are still out there, just not usually on theatrical release.
For example, Netflix has put out a new non-Gerwig Barbie film at a rate of one or two every year since the start of the decade. Since Barbie was released, in fact, we’ve had Barbie: Skipper and the Big Babysitting Adventure (Barbie’s little sister successfully starts her own company), Barbie and Stacie to the Rescue (Barbie and her friend make new friends at a hot air balloon festival) and Barbie and Teresa: Recipe for Friendship (Barbie and her friends make food for a restaurant). Similarly, Netflix has an array of My Little Pony shows and films, none of which attempt to do anything but tell stories about My Little Ponies. The same goes for Thomas the Tank Engine.
None of these have made a billion dollars. You don’t have to be a financial expert to assume that the Sylvanian Families film won’t either. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Freya needs to find a lovely birthday present for her mummy. Really, isn’t that enough?
