Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan co-star in this comedy-drama telling the behind-the-scenes story of the Beanie Babies phenomenon.
It used to be that aspiring filmmakers went to film school. Now they all seem to be attending business universities, judging by the number of product-themed releases hitting theaters and particularly streaming services.
Arriving shortly on the heels of such similarly themed efforts as Tetris, Air, BlackBerry and Flamin’ Hot is Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash’s comedy-drama about a toy that reached stratospheric heights in the ’90s before crashing down to earth. Whether you purchased them for your children or played with them yourself, you’re likely to remember the frenzy depicted in The Beanie Bubble, receiving a limited theatrical release a week before streaming on Apple TV+.
Based on Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book The Great Beanie Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, the film features Zach Galifianakis (who also executive produced) as Ty Warner, the eccentric businessman and founder of Ty Inc. — described in the movie as “a stuffed Himalayan cat business” — which went on to manufacture Beanie Babies. The product became a phenomenon thanks to innovative design, canny marketing that took advantage of the burgeoning internet, and the tendency of consumers to look for ways to make a quick buck by reselling them on eBay.
“We didn’t set out to make America lose its mind, but that’s what happened,” says Ty’s business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks) early in the film, shortly after we see a tractor-trailer crash on a highway, spewing out thousands of the plush toys into the air in a beautiful Beanie Baby aerial ballet. Warner’s genius stroke was to understuff his creations, making them more flexible and posable than traditional stuffed animals. He sold only to mom-and-pop stores rather than big box establishments (“We are all about the little guy!” he proclaims), carefully limiting supplies to build up demand.
The liberally fictionalized screenplay looks at the story from a feminist perspective, told through the viewpoints of three women who figured prominently in Warner’s success: Robbie, a friend and neighbor with whom he forms his first company and begins a romantic relationship; Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), who starts working for him at age 17 and proves instrumental in designing the company’s innovative internet strategies; and Sheila (Sarah Snook), a single mother of two young daughters who becomes his live-in girlfriend.
As excellently portrayed by Galifianakis in one of his best performances to date, Warner is shown to be both a lovable innocent who delights in the joy his creations give children and a self-absorbed neurotic who ruthlessly exploits those who work for and with him and callously cheats on his romantic partners. It’s a complex, multi-faceted portrayal in which he’s adorable one minute (performing a synchronized dance routine at a roller rink with Sheila’s children to Ready for the World’s “Oh Sheila” as a marriage proposal) and venal the next (essentially stealing the company away from Robbie).
The screenplay written by Gore (she’s Al’s daughter and married to co-director Kulash, the lead singer and guitarist of the band OK Go) proves confusing in its chronology, constantly shifting back and forth in time to parallel the stories of the three women who were involved with Warner at different times. It proves more interesting in its chronicling of the business practices that made the Beanie Babies such a sensation, at least for a while, than in its portrait of personal dramas, the veracity of which obviously has to be called into question. Overall, the movie follows a by-now familiar trajectory, with the company’s mammoth success inevitably followed by its big fall.
The three female leads deliver winning performances: Banks is amusingly fierce as her character turns the tables on Ty; Viswanathan is endearing as the young woman whose tech savvy ultimately propels her to bigger and better things; and Snook displays a softer side than in her celebrated Succession turn with yet another portrayal revolving around a ruthless businessman.
Using plenty of news and archival footage from the period, The Beanie Bubble well conveys its ’90s setting, with Renee Ehrlich Kalfus’ excellent costume designs as character-defining as they are colorful.