Life-Size


Life-Size is a 2000 American fantasy comedy television film directed by Mark Rosman and starring Lindsay Lohan and Tyra Banks. It originally premiered on March 5, 2000, on ABC as part of The Wonderful World of Disney block. Lohan portrays a young girl who casts a magic spell to bring back her deceased mother and, instead, accidentally brings to life her fashion doll, played by Banks. The film then follows their relationship as the doll creates havoc while trying to fit into the real world.
Life-Size was popular among its demographic, developing a cult following that frequently revisited and reexamined it in the years following its release, and generated a sequel 18 years after the original broadcast. It is considered a didactic children's film that set the tone for doll-inspired movies and is perceived by many fans as "the first live-action Barbie movie" due to the similarities between the two dolls despite not having the rights to the official character. The film made its streaming debut on Disney+ in November 2025, after previously never having been available through digital platforms.
The sequel, titled Life-Size 2: A Christmas Eve, premiered on December 2, 2018 on Freeform with Banks reprising her role. In 2020, Banks announced another sequel was in the works.

Plot

Casey Stuart is a tomboyish girl who is the quarterback of her school's 7th-grade football team. After the passing of her mother, she avoids old friends and becomes stand-offish to a boy on the football team. Casey, determined to resurrect her mother, finds a book called "The Book of Awakenings" at a local bookstore. The book contains instructions on how to resurrect the dead and states that a successful resurrection will become permanent unless it’s undone before sunset on the fourth day after it begins.
Following the book's instructions, Casey collects artifacts from her mother's life, including locks of her hair in her hairbrush. However, the resurrection is unwittingly sabotaged when Drew McDonald, a woman who works with and is romantically interested in Casey's widowed father, Ben, gives Casey an Eve doll, a plastic fashion doll in the form of a young pretty woman, manufactured by Marathon Toys. Eve is stated to have many add-on accessories, including outfits appropriate to taxing careers such as law enforcement, medicine and outer space, and lives in Sunnyvale, "in the middle of America".
Drew discovers the Eve doll soon discarded by Casey and uses the hairbrush to brush the doll's hair. With strands from Casey's Eve doll remaining on the brush as Casey utters the incantation, the magic acts on her doll rather than her mother, and Casey wakes up the next morning to find Eve in bed with her in full-size human form. Casey is upset by this, but Eve is excited about being a real woman.
Casey begins to look for the second volume of the book with instructions on how to undo the resurrection downtown but sees that she has to wait for it to arrive to the store. Leaving the store, she accidentally falls onto the street. Eve steps in front of the truck, using her police training to stop it, as Ben discovers Casey's whereabouts. Thankful that Eve saved his daughter, he asks how he can repay Eve. After Eve tells him she is from out-of-town and doesn't have any possessions nor a place to stay, tells her he can buy her new clothes and that she can stay at their house.
She then proceeds buys clothes at the local shopping mall and eats for the first time with the family. Eve mentions that she has had numerous jobs including working as a doctor, police officer, and secretary which causes Ben to hire her as a temp. She tries to do secretarial work and fails, but helps boost the morale of Ben's coworker, Ellen. She is then invited to a corporate event where she sings her theme song on stage, much to everyone's enjoyment.
During this time, tension builds between Casey and her father, who has been missing her football games while trying to secure a promotion in his law firm. The tension is further increased by Ben's attraction to Eve, which Casey resents as a betrayal to her mother. However, as Eve helps Casey with her self-confidence and coping with the loss of her mother, they gradually become friends. By the time the second volume of the magic book arrives at the bookstore, Casey has decided she likes Eve, so she does not buy it. Unfortunately, Eve has been getting homesick and becomes aware that her doll collection has taken a tumble in sales.
Discouraged by her difficulties in being a real woman and worried about being cancelled by Marathon, Eve decides to undo the spell herself. After buying the second volume of the book and saying goodbye to Ben at Casey's championship game, she goes to Sunnyvale, a specially decorated room at Marathon headquarters, and recites the incantation. When Casey and Ben arrive, she tearfully bids them farewell and turns back into a doll. Ben suggests he and Casey put Eve "someplace real special". Sometime later, with the lessons learned from her experiences in the real world, Eve becomes a popular toy again. Casey reconnects with her friends, Ben is promoted at work and Drew takes him to lunch.
The film ends with the cast dancing to Eve's theme song, with an apparently still-real Eve singing and dancing along.

Cast

The film was made-for-television. Lohan was given the role of Casey Stuart following her successful film debut in The Parent Trap as a part of a three-picture contract with The Walt Disney Company. Banks was given the role of Eve, the doll that is magically transformed into a live woman during Casey's attempt to bring her mother back to life. Costume designer Maya Mani said, "It was a joy to work with Tyra because she knows how to wear clothes. No matter what we put on her, she could carry it off." Lohan and Banks were paired for a screen test at the Plaza Hotel in New York City before production started. Lohan's siblings Michael, Aliana and Dakota appear in uncredited cameos cheering in the football stands. Stephanie Moore came up with the idea of a doll coming to life and collaborated with the director, Mark Rosman, on the script for the film. ABC was very interested in acquiring the project, but Disney asked for a rewrite of the original ending which saw Eve becoming a human and marrying Casey's father.
Pre-production began in the summer of 1999 and filming began in October 1999, taking place for three weeks in Vancouver, British Columbia. British Columbia flags remained on the license plate of Casey's father Ben, but the province text is replaced with "Evergreen State" for the movie. The toy store used in the film is called Kaboodles, which is the real store's name located in Point Grey. The commercial for the Eve doll at the beginning of the film was created with production designer David Fischer deliberately going for a Jetsons-inspired 1950s retro look. Life-Size was slated to premiere as a part of ABC's The Wonderful World of Disney on February 27, 2000, but was delayed by one week, and later released on March 5.
Rosman talked about the movie in various interviews in the early 2020s, revealing the original script was called Ken and Barbie before Disney bought it. Out of concern that Mattel wouldn't sign off on lending the rights to Barbie, the duo avoided mentioning the doll in subsequent drafts of the script. He also looked back on working with the lead stars: "It was a big hit on the Disney Channel. was fantastic, this was like her next thing and had never really acted before and she ended up being really great, so that was fun, a lot of fun. I was nervous because Tyra was obviously, you know, new to acting. We had Lindsay, and the amazing thing was, just jumped off the screen! The connection between her and Lindsay was fantastic." Although the director initially had concerns about her casting, Banks was "able to really embody the character" after she suggested to dress up in character during rehearsals. He added, "We ended up having the chance to do some rehearsal with in the weeks before we were shooting, which was very rare for TV movies on those schedules, but she was willing to do it, and then I got the two of them together and they were just sort of a magical pair!"

Music

Mark Rosman and George Blondheim wrote a song titled "Be a Star" to be used as the theme song for the movie. Eve sings the track during a business party scene and it is also reprised in a dance scene with the rest of the cast shown at the end of the film. Rosman recalled making the song: "We needed a theme song for the toy and there was a guy that we had hired in Vancouver, where we shot, to be kind of the band leader, because there was a scene where they had this band that was gonna play this song. He wrote the music, I wrote the lyrics literally in the back of an envelope kind of thing, and we put it together... and here I am, it's the only song I've ever written but I'm proud of it, it was fun!" He stated "I wanted it to be something where you could really stand up and cheer," and continued about filming the scene which he called an "unrehearsed accident" that happened when they were about to wrap and had just finished shooting what was intended to be the last scene:
Rosman also revealed part of the reason why the theme song was called "Be a Star" was because the doll was originally named Star in the script, but the filmmakers were legally required to change it due to copyright issues as toy companies were developing a doll with the same name. Two songs by the Irish girl group B*Witched were used in the film: "C'est la Vie" and "Rollercoaster". A song from American girl group Nobody's Angel's debut album, "Keep Me Away", was used near the end of the film.