If you use any social media that features short-form video content, there’s a high chance you’ve seen a video from Sylvanian Drama on your “For You Page.” For the uninitiated, Sylvanian Drama is a popular TikTok account that posts miniature satirical soap opera episodes using stop-motion videos of Calico Critter toys.
The plotlines of Sylvanian Drama videos tend to be outlandish and offensive, reminiscent of something found in a South Park episode, but different in that they are rapid-fire, over in around 40 to 50 seconds. The bizarre and often dark dialogue is expressed entirely through captions and emojis and usually juxtaposes the cute toys and upbeat 2000s pop music in the background.
@sylvaniandrama Karma #sylvanianfamilies #drama #barbie ♬ Afterglow – Ed Sheeran
Even though the account might seem like it caters to a relatively niche audience, it has grown rapidly over the past few years. The TikTok account, run by Thea von Engelbrecht, posted its first video on January 22, 2021, and has since amassed 2.4 million followers, with a total of 65.3 million views on the platform. At the very least, Engelbrecht is successful enough to afford to go full-time with the channel, with sponsorships from companies such as Burberry and Amazon.
All this to say that Englebrecht is clearly responding to a vital need on the 2020s internet: the desire for doll drama.
Audiences and creators alike have been fascinated for longer than most people probably realize. Arguably, stop-motion and puppets are just high-tech extensions of doll drama. Still, there have also been movies as far back as the 1980s replicating the play-style filmmaking of accounts like Sylvanian Drama.
In particular, Todd Haynes’ 1987 film “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” comes to mind, which used stop-motion Barbies to effect a tragic irony whilst depicting the tale of Karen Carpenter’s lifelong battle with anorexia nervosa. While not comedic, using figures that are traditionally children’s toys to deliver shockingly adult dialogue, subverting the audience’s expectations, is the heartbeat of most “doll drama” works.
In the internet age, one of the most formative doll dramas, and perhaps the precursor to all internet culture surrounding the genre, was the YouTube web series “Littlest Pet Shop: Popular.”
The first episode of “Littlest Pet Shop: Popular” “LPS: Popular” for short was uploaded to YouTube on July 5, 2010, by user sophiegarrett, later known as SophieGTV. The series was similar to many teen dramas at the time in that it followed the new girl in school, a dachshund bobblehead named Savannah Reed, as she navigated social life and attempted to overtake the popular clique led by her ex-best friend and cat figurine, Brooklyn Hayes.
“LPS: Popular” was not unique for the time it debuted. There were dozens of video series from various channels involving elaborate stories acted out by stop-motion LPS figurines. The sophiegarrett channel even had different stories running at the same time as “LPS: Popular,” including “CSI: LPS,” which was similar in length, but never reached the same popularity.
Perhaps “LPS: Popular” breached LPS YouTube containment because it was a genuine, well-executed attempt at a 2000s high school soap opera. “Mean Girls,” “Gossip Girl,” and “The O.C.” all came out in the decade prior, and the show clearly draws inspiration from the genre as a whole. Its methods may seem silly, but its subject matter is very serious, and the series deals with issues like bullying and eating disorders with surprising sobriety. As such, it garnered a sincere tween-age fanbase and spread quickly among this demographic likely due to the accessibility of YouTube.
If the earnestness of “LPS: Popular” is the foundation of doll drama on YouTube, then “The Most Popular Girls in School” (or, as their dedicated fandom calls it, “MPGIS”) marks a return to the dark satire found in the likes of “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” This stop-motion Barbie web series premiered on May 1, 2012, and essentially functioned as an over-the-top parody of high school dramas.
By 2012, the previous decade’s teenage television and movie tropes had become well-established and were maybe even growing a bit stale. “MPGIS” clearly recognized this and took action, with the advantage of early YouTube as a platform, which generally allowed them to say whatever they wanted. The result is raunchy, beyond-the-pale humor that starkly contrasts the picture-perfect Barbie smiles, and could definitely be seen as a forerunner to channels like Sylvanian Drama.
Now, nearly a decade after the creation of “MPGIS,” and well after the first season of “LPS: Popular,” Sylvanian Drama is picking up the torch and creating doll dramedies for the modern era. The result is similar in some ways, but not without significant differences from its predecessors.
In the age of TikTok, long-term, story-driven content isn’t selling. Instead, it’s about the short, consumable, and memorable bites of comedy. Aside from this shift in the public’s attention span, there’s also been a change in the media landscape. Currently, the themes and tropes of the high school shows that started the doll drama genre have been around for nearly 20 years and are now so familiar to most that even parody plotlines like the ones featured in “MPGIS” can feel tired and reused.
Sylvanian Drama solves both of these problems via abstraction to the point of distortion, with minute-long story arcs that cover what would have been an entire “MPGIS” season. For example, a TikTok uploaded this past December covers a marriage failing, a drug relapse, a hook-up with an ex, and the subsequent crashing and destruction of a wedding, all within 55 seconds.
The light-speed insanity of plotlines like these works well within the genre itself, as it makes tired tropes unrecognizable and, against footage of the objectively cutesy and wholesome Calico Critters, funnier.
Engelbrecht successfully updated the genre, and it looks like the spirit of “LPS: Popular” will continue to live on in the next generation. Maybe in ten or so years, we’ll see a university soap opera involving Squishmallows, or a hospital drama starring Hello Kitty figurines. One thing’s for certain: the people demand doll drama, and someone will always rise to fill the need.
