What’s fact and fiction in the ‘The Beanie Bubble’ film, starring Elizabeth Banks and Zach Galifianakis, on Apple TV+

Those who lived through the 1990s will remember the Beanie Baby craze, a phenomenon so absurd that it now seems like a fever dream. The rise and fall of the infamous stuffed toy was the subject of Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book, “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute.” The details of this mind-boggling story were so compelling that directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash knew it would make a great movie.

“The Beanie Bubble” is inspired by the story behind one of the biggest speculative crazes that blazed through American culture in the ’90s. It pulls back the curtain on the absurdities and injustices of the American Dream — particularly the female relationship to it. It’s a celebration of the women who helped power Ty Warner’s success, whose strengths and good instincts shaped and amplified the phenomenon, but whose names are not on the Beanie Babies’ heart-shaped tags.

The film is co-directed by the married directing duo, Emmy Award nominee Kristin Gore (“Saturday Night Live,” “Futurama”) and Grammy Award winner Damian Kulash (OK Go). The film’s screenplay is written by Gore. “The Beanie Bubble” joins an ever-expanding lineup of Apple Original Films.

Emily Zemler for the Los Angeles Times:

“The Beanie Bubble” stars Zach Galifianakis as real-life toy titan H. Ty Warner, but shifts its perspective away from him to three pivotal women in his life. Each impacted the success of Beanie Babies, but never got the credit they were due. Instead of directly recounting the facts in Bissonnette’s book, Gore and Kulash elected to fictionalize certain aspects.

“It went through many drafts,” Gore explains. “And then we developed this idea of wanting to tell more of a fable and a universal story.”

“There are so many weird little snippets of things that happened around the swirl of Beanie Babies that, if you wanted to tell a purely real story, it’s there,” Kulash adds. “But it wouldn’t have the same heart and depth and human journey through it.”

The film, told in a non-linear fashion that allows its three story lines to reach a similar emotional crescendo, makes no pretense that some of it isn’t accurate, opening with the tag: “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did.” But despite some narrative dramatization, much of “The Beanie Bubble” is based on fact.

MacDailyNews Note: Check out “The Beanie Bubble” film’s official trailer:

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