The dolls with the inordinately large heads are moving to the big screen as the live-action film "Bratz: The Movie" hits theaters today.
Armed with their friendship and a "passion for fashion," the real-live Bratz - Cloe (Skyler Shaye), Jade (Janel Parrish), Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), and Sasha (Logan Browning) - enter their first day of high school together, after Internet video-conferencing about their outfits that morning, of course.
Meredith (Chelsea Staub) is the fascist school president who already has the student body neatly divided into 48 cliques, and she's determined to split the four friends.
But the Bratz do that pretty well themselves. The cliques are actually more like interest groups devoid of any social hierarchy, and the Bratz girls, along with their ethnic diversity, have varied interests. Cloe is a soccer-playing blonde, Sasha an African-American cheerleader, Jade a half-Asian science geek/costume designer, and Yasmin a Spanish singer paralyzed by stage fright.
Two years later, the Bratz are strangers to each other; that is, until Cloe's klutziness starts a schoolwide food fight and the four girls land in detention together. Reconciliation ensues, and the Bratz band together once again to fight the evils of Meredith's power-tripping social-partitioning with song, dance, shopping and makeup.
Shaye, 20, Browning, 18, and Parrish, 18, have finished high school, leaving Ramos, 15, who just completed her freshman year back home in Miami Beach.
"I love high school," Ramos, who favors history and English, said of her nearly 2,500-student high school. "And it's so real, this film - I just went through the same thing with my best friends. But I hang out with everyone. I'm just friends with eeeveryone; I love it."
The Bratz dolls are touted for their ethnic diversity and sometimes criticized for their rampant materialism and for wearing short, tight clothing, makeup by the pound and platform shoes.
"I know some parents are afraid that the way the dolls are dressed, they might not want their daughters . . . to dress like that," said the "Bratz" director, Sean McNamara. "You can't take those clothes and put them on real human beings because it wouldn't look great, so we went out of our way to make the wardrobe be very parent-friendly."
Don't think for a second that projecting dolls as flesh-and-blood people is easy.
"We all had to do a lot of research on our characters. Like, you know, find out about the dolls," Parrish, a native Hawaiian, said. "Like, they each have distinct personalities. We had to kind of live up to [the girls'] expectations."
The dolls are marketed primarily for 4- to 8-year-olds, but McNamara said the movie targets 'tweens as well.
"And I think there will be even older teen girls who secretly want to go see it," McNamara said.
"I'd go see it," Shaye added helpfully.
Shaye, who guest-starred in the "Grey's Anatomy" pilot, and Parrish, who claims Broadway as her first love, do not have immediate plans for college. Parrish said she had planned to apply last year, but "then 'Bratz' came up, and I was like, 'Oh yeah, I don't have to go to college!' " Parrish squealed. "No, but I definitely want to go to college," she added.
Browning will head to Vanderbilt later this month. Though she originally wanted to major in marketing, since "Bratz," Browning plans to major in film studies and theater.
She added that Vanderbilt is willing to work with her so she can do a "Bratz 2."
That's right, there's going to be a sequel; the screenplay is being written right now.
And all four Bratz girls are super-psyched about it.
Will the Bratz move onto college? Is there another year of high school to endure? McNamara won't say.
But rest assured, it will include lots more friendship. And shoes and lip gloss. *