A Ukrainian animation series takes Barbie on a horror trip across a garbage wasteland created by her plastic world

She has been an astronaut, a surgeon, and a UNICEF ambassador. Now, one Ukrainian animation studio is giving iconic toy Barbie one more role: as a one-woman environmental disaster.

Plastikwood Animations launched a digital animation series taking Barbie — renamed as a fitting and more copyright-friendly Garbie — across a 3D world of garbage that has grown thanks to her own reckless everyday consumerism.

“We used horror film cliches to terrify our viewers about pollution,” scriptwriter and director Vlad Yudi told The Calvert Journal. “This is like a form of anti-advertising, which encourages you to buy less, not more.”

Yudi came up with the idea for the series after quitting his previous job as a modelling agent. “My conscience was uneasy because I worked in an industry which encouraged people to buy a lot of rubbish they didn’t need, so I quit,” he said. He then founded the studio Plastikwood, under the motto “Make art, not garbage.”

To build the cartoon set, Plastikwood Animations’ creative team and volunteers collected garbage from public spaces, as well as via an open call over the past six months. “Our call to collect garbage for this animation meant that hundreds of people sorted their waste for the first time ever. We were able prevented hundreds of kilograms of toxic substances from forming in the environment,” Yudi added.

Wrapped in Plastic: Garbie’s Adventures is also an immersive experience for the visitors at the Plastikwood museum in Kyiv, where they can walk through their own rubbish-strewn maze before watching the film in the museum cinema.