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Thumbelina

The movie starts with Barbie bringing a class to a Nature Reserve to plant trees. She tells the kids the story of Thumbelina. There are these tiny people called twillerbees, and they live in peace far from humans. Twillerbees have special powers and a special connection with the plants; they can make them grow faster and even bring them back from the dead. One day, Thumbelina and her friends are living their best life until they spot some humans in the area. They decide to go check it out. To do so undiscovered, they hide in a flower patch. However, the flowers they hide in get taken to a penthouse apartment in the city. The apartment belongs to the parents of a girl named Makena. The parents are planning to tear down the field in order to build their factory, saying that “no one will miss a little old field.” Thumbelina persuades Makena to convince her parents to stop construction on the factory. After dealing with some of the issues/problems they had to face, Makena and Thumbelina successfully managed to dissuade Makena’s parents from building their factory. The story has a happy ending, with the peaceful (and adorable) birth of the twillerbabies, who would never have been born if construction wasn’t stopped. The scene then cuts back to Barbie and her class. When Barbie finishes the story by saying that Makena’s family turned the area into a nature reserve and allows the children to look for twillerbees, Thumbelina and her friends leave the class a surprise.

This movie exhibits the blatant message of plants and nature being good, and that our materialistic and status-obsessed society needs to recognize the importance of respecting the environment. In the beginning, Makena’s parents have no regard for the environment. They state outright that “It's just one little field. It won’t make that much of a difference.” In the end, however, they realize how much pain they could've caused had they gone through with constructing the factory.

But consider this:

if everyone says one little field doesn’t matter, then there won’t be any fields left. 

Watch Barbie Presents Thumbelina (2009)
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