At its essence, a script consists of two things: dialogue and scene description (or "action").

The writer scripts what the characters say; and describes what they're doing and what the audience would see -- at least the important stuff.

Because too much detail can be laborious to read and should be left to the production.

Inherent in those basic guidelines are the keys to good scene description:

1. It clearly indicates what the audience would see (and nothing more).

2. It avoids making the reader work hard. Meaning it's easy and even fun to read.

It sounds simple but like so much about writing, it's harder to do really well than it seems.

Let's start with Barbie's world building. 

Whenever a movie or series has a fantastical premise, with elements that don't exist in our life on earth, we can say it's building its own "world," with certain "rules" to how everything works.

In such stories it's imperative the audience is able to understand and buy into those rules, and suspend disbelief enough to be able to engage with and relate to the story on a human level.

That's where I think Barbie is most challenged.

It owes an obvious debt to movies where innocents from another land come to earth, such as Enchanted and Elf -- or where toys have lives and agency beyond their real-life "object" status, like Pixar's Toy Story and its sequels, or The Lego Movie.

In all of these, there are relatively simple explanations for how the fantastical elements work -- how these characters end up involved in what they're doing. And the audience gets caught up in a fairly straightforward overall story goal that's easy to buy into and root for, once you take that leap of accepting the world's "rules."

With Barbie, I think it's not quite so simple.

For me, it all begins when "Weird Barbie" explains that the main character's sudden thoughts about death and flat feet must mean that someone in the real world who is playing with her is having some problems that caused all this.

This is the first big "rule" and I think it's a tough one to wrap your head around. The concept is that while the characters seem to have autonomous lives and even a government in "Barbieland," they are also mere toys played with by humans they've never met in the "real world."

We never see this going on and it's something Barbie wasn't aware of. No one seems to be.

It's a lot less simple and easy to grasp than the situation Woody, Buzz and the others have in Toy Story. They are clearly owned and played with by humans they feel a bond with. The only "rule" is that when the humans aren't around, the toys come to life and have their own mini-society, of sorts. Not governments or a special land or parallel reality, just personalities and relationships with each others, with Woody as a de facto leader.

In scripts, simple is usually better. A simple premise to buy into, and a simple story goal that's easy to care about on a primal level. It gets complicated to solve, but its basic nature and the reason we should care is usually simple. I'd argue that's the case in the four movies I mentioned.

Barbie has elements of some of these when she travels to the real world, where she's going to be shocked by what it's like. She does so through a fanciful series of transportation devices. It's funny and fun to watch, but I'm not sure it's easy to grasp or buy into how this physical journey between two kind of parallel realities is as simple as that. 

In any event, when she and Ken get to real world L.A., it's not really the fish out of water tale we see in Enchanted or Elf -- which hinge on the unlikeliness of a seeming "fool" succeeding in the big bad real world at something important to them.

Now you might say such a situation is too familiar so it's good to do something different here, and I wouldn't necessarily argue that point.

However, I do question how easy it is to buy into and care about what she is trying to do. She wants to find the person who apparently caused her to have an existential crisis, but I'm not sure that goal is as primal, understandable and compelling to audiences (who haven't really seen that side of things and come to care strongly about that character). And almost as soon as she's done so, she's faced with a different kind of problem, which is that the Mattel executives take her.

While on one hand it's good to "punish" your main character with a variety of challenges, I think it tends to be more effective when there's one big problem that takes the whole movie to solve, like these other movies have, as opposed to shifting sands like we have here.

It's not really that Barbie can't fit in on earth, or that she has to help the mother and daughter, or that she has to escape the Mattel people, or stop Ken from changing Barbieland. It's kind of all of these things, each of which gets some screen time, but no one of which is really central.

I also think the supporting dramatic material behind each of these is a little flimsy. The Mattel executives especially were depicted as so ineffectual that they don't seem to be a real ongoing threat to her, and the rules about how dolls can come into the real world and what must be done seem a bit hazy, with so much played for broad comedy that I think it's hard to really buy into.

For me, it's ideal in a script if there's one major outcome the audience is meant to root for starting early on, that the main character is continually focused on. And that's grounded in an identifiable reality the audience starts to see themselves in.

I think that's a little hard to ever do here.

Do we want Barbie to change out of the naive person she was, as in Legally Blonde, while keeping some of her essential goodness? I suppose we kind of do, but it doesn't seem to be primarily about that, either -- with some challenge in a strange land to rise up and face, that will help her to eventually do that.

It's about so many different things, each of which has a possibly shaky or underdeveloped set of world building rules, that if you look at it on a script/story level, beyond the sheen of the finished film, it plays more like a series of fun set pieces strung together, rather than an evolving story that it's easy to get emotionally invested in.

But maybe that's enough! At least for a finished film with a lot going for it, of a kind that audiences might be hankering for.

But if this was a spec script from an original idea? I have my doubts.

The other big element of the story is Ken. Arguably he has a more relatable problem early on, a simple objective anyone can understand. He wants Barbie's love. While she arguably seems more like a doll than a human, he at least has that one attribute that everyone's experienced.

Then when he gets to the real world and sees men are in charge there, it gives him an interesting new perspective. But rather than continuing with his sympathetic desire to be something more to Barbie, he turns into something of a villain character for how he later changes Barbieland. And the third act becomes about defeating him, in a feminists-vs.-the-patriarchy way that definitely has some satisfying and funny moments. But his character comes in and out of the story as a kind of device to create plot for her, in the second half, and I think it's hard to ever see him as a truly difficult adversary, and to understand how the men are able to truly take over. (The rules of how Barbieland handles elections and has a government aren't given much convincing focus.)

Perhaps this would be worthy of a whole movie instead of just a climax -- a story where Barbie has to save Barbieland from toxic men led by her main Ken. To me, picking one main goal and really taking the time to make it believable and emotional for the audience might be stronger than stringing together so many various story challenges and elements. 

But maybe I'm being a little tough on the film. In some ways it's great that they pulled off what they did. Rather than add my voice to the celebrations of what they achieved, though, I wanted to focus on what the lessons are here for writers.

And if you felt as I did that the story and characters were less engaging emotionally, less substantial than those other titles mentioned above, I would suggest that these are the reasons.

And they may be good things to think about in whatever you're writing...