Movie Review: Bratz: The Movie

Based on the popular line of children's toys, "Bratz: The Movie" is overly earnest, enthusiastic and overflowing with pastel colors so bright that they could conceivably burn out a retina or two.

The story focuses on four friends: the spirited Sasha (Logan Browning), brainy Jade (Janel Parrish), athletic Cloe (Skyler Shaye) and timid Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos). Best friends for years, the girls plan to stay together as they start their freshman year of high school. Meredith (Chelsea Staub), the Queen Bee of Carry Nation High School, has other plans for them, though, especially since her father (a completely clueless Jon Voight) is the principal. Using segregation strategies that have been applied to prisons, Meredith assigns the students to cliques, which are the groups that they will sit with during lunch.

Yasmin and her friends initially defy Meredith's orderly seating arrangements, but nature eventually takes its course. Sasha gravitates towards the cheerleaders, Jade starts hanging out with the brainy mathletes and Cloe struts her stuff on the soccer field, leaving quiet little Yasmin all by herself. Two years pass, and, as the girls begin their junior year, they finally realize that although they all have different interests, they still can remain close friends. Their respective cliques don't know how to handle this rebellion at first, but soon other students follow their example and sit wherever they want.

Meredith, who resembles Marsha Brady's evil twin, doesn't take this lying down, though, and she uses all the dirty tricks in her book to restore order to the school, even resorting to blackmail.

Though the movie is based on a toy line, the story by Adam De La Pena and Susan Estelle Jansen's screenplay for "Bratz: The Movie" borrow shamelessly from "High School Musical," especially in one scene where the students confess their secret desires. De La Pena and Jansen even lift the bitter irony of "Mr. Holland's Opus" by giving Yasmin, who has a beautiful singing voice, a love interest who is deaf. He still enjoys her music, though, by feeling the vibrations from the loudspeakers.

Ignoring those obvious similarities, "Bratz" is a warm and fuzzy movie that preaches the tried-and-true lesson that everyone needs to be true to themselves, no matter what anyone else says. One has to wonder, though, if the teenage girls who will see this movie even know who legendary activist Carry Nation was and why her statue in the high school courtyard shows her brandishing an ax. That's one lesson that De La Pena and Jansen didn't bother to include or borrow.

"Bratz: The Movie" is rated PG for thematic elements.