This ain’t your mother’s Dreamhouse. Or yours, most likely. In fact, until Greta Gerwig came along to escort Barbie to Oscar territory, I’m not sure they ever made a Dreamhouse like this one.

Created at the zenith of the Obama era, the animated web series Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse anticipated the fourth-wall-breaking, consumerism-lampooning, Ken-mocking comedy of 2023’s Barbie by over a decade. It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a 12-episode run on Netflix right now, and if you’re looking for more of the movie’s cheerfully subversive magic, it’s all right here.

Written primarily by David Wiebe and Robin J. Stein and produced by Mattel as a series of web and YouTube shorts — collected by theme into the 12 Netflix episodes — from 2012–15, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse has little in common with the glut of other CGI Barbieanimated shows littering the big red streaming service. This isn’t a straightforward comedy-adventure kids’ cartoon, though it’s certainly …