What is OUR DOLLS?

When people stumble across this site, it is common for them to be a bit confused. What is this site really about? Is it about collecting? Is it about storytelling? Why are there stuffed animals and many different doll brands all living together?

Well, here is the story of OUR DOLLS.

When I was two years old, I got Kirsten from my Grandmother for Christmas.

When my sister Willow was old enough, she got Felicity. And when our little sister Solana was old enough, she got Josefina.

By the time that Solana started to play dolls, Willow and I had already developed an entire world of stories and imagination through the things we'd made our dolls do.

Because, we actually played dolls. When someone hears us say that we play dolls, they usually think we mean making them have tea parties, or dressing them up in fancy clothes. Well, that's a little of it. But there is so much more! Our dolls have been on skiing vacations, put on plays (we had to memorise all of the lines and perform it with them), opened shops, been to France in our backyard, held horseriding competitions, ice-skating competitions, and huge festivals, they go to camp every year and play capture the flag, and perform the 2-hour Nutcracker ballet for many people in December of every year.

We spend hours and hours playing dolls. Making them answer letters from their penpals which will be delivered by Laura Windmill, who owns the post office downtown, practicing their handwriting, making clothes for their families, developing the Pleasantville fashions. All of the dolls have huge personalities.

Solana joins in!

As soon as she was old enough, Solana started to play with us.

I like to say that each of my dolls represents a part of my own personality. Samantha is my fancy, frilly side, Kirsten is my love of freedom, Suzanna is my perfectionist side, and Angelica is my optimism, while Sonja is my snooty side, and Mrs. Montoya is my responsibility. It's fun to play with them and to exercise these parts of my own personality.

When we play dolls, we never plan what they are going to do. It is all spontaneous. One thing leads to another thing, and soon there are huge stories going on and long lists of more things that we need to do. Suzanna has tons of homework to do, (actually do), Samantha has to organize that ball next week, and Mrs. Montoya needs to make embroidered camisas for all of her little daughters!

The first doll movie

This is the cover of our un-released first doll movie, OUR DOLLS.

So one day I wanted to try and share the doll world with my parents. So I took our home video camera back to the Larson's house and tried stop-frame animation on Kirsten. The result had my sisters and I giggling and excited. The dolls looked so real!!

Since then, we have continued to make movies using ideas which were all based on things that we'd actually made the dolls do sometime before.

A Day In Pleasantville tried to capture the dolls' daily schedule from school classes and drama club to recess, soccer and swim team. Then we went seperately to each dollhouse to show their different chores and after-school activities: laundry at the Montoyas, violin practice at the Larsons, walking dogs at the Parkingtons, delivering mail with the Windmills and riding horses at the Merrimans.

Anna and the Barn Dance explored the relationship between the parents and kids of Pleasantville, and between the kids themselves, while also giving us a reason to use some of our favorite music and to make immensely fun dancing scenes during the barn dance! Who could pass up the opportunity to make Mr. Larson and Mr. Merriman fly past each other in midair doing the splits. I definitely couldn't!

Our Dolls and the Great Outdoors was based on all of the funny things that happened when we were playing dolls at their summer camp. Nancy saying "chocolate" while sleepwalking and snoring, playing capture the flag and card games, braiding each other's hair and swimming in the river...
And the second half was to recreate a particularly amazing set-up that we put together for our dolls when they hiked together through a wilderness of upturned couches linked by tiny bridges and huge waterfalls. Everyone needed to see this!!

Pumpkins and Candy Canes: A Holiday Celebration was our first attempt at trying to show everyone's holiday traditions. We had to have some ice-skating, and present -wrapping, and of course a Nutcracker rehearsal. After much debate we decided to put a real clip of us doing the Nutcracker doll ballet in that movie. Seeing real people in the movie gives it a whole new perspective. And we absolutely had to have Nancy sing her Tigger song "I want to scare myself." She's the biggest tigger fan in the world, everyone knows that. :)

The Kitty Kapers; Case of the Stolen Dress was our first doll movie after a long move to a new house where it took us several years to get back into the swing of things in the doll world.
We wanted the dolls to be really good actors this time around. Nancy is one of our favorite characters, and we wanted the kitties to have a chance to shine in this one. All of the chase scenes with hilarious music, and the beautiful dress shop full of real Pleasantville fashions that Willow sewed were things that we'd wanted in a doll movie for quite some time.

And now we're currently in production for our 6th doll movie (actually it's technically the 10th, but the first four were not good enough to mention on this site), which is the most advanced so far. Using what we learned about new technology by doing the Kitty Kapers, the new movie is an intense study of the Montoya family through Josefina's desire to entire a horseriding competition. So many things in this movie are based on real doll play that we had to go back and watch old "snippets" videos that my mom taped of us playing dolls to get the dialogue right for certain scenes. They were so hilarious when we watched them, that we're sure they'll be even better when the dolls do them by themselves.

This movie is still in the preproduction stage, as Willow and I are having waaay too much fun with the script, but we can't wait to start filming it!

In the world of OUR DOLLS, nothing ever just stays still! There is always something going on; either the Larsons need to fill up their storeroom before winter, or the Montoyas need to prepare their rancho for the flood season, or the Merrimans need to finish up their samplers, but there is always more to do. And doing those things is only the springboard for adventures I can only imagine.

It's hard to explain, but hopefully i've done it alright.
I would like to mention one thing though. The book that has inspired us the most to our current dollplay is this one right here .

Tasha Tudor's book about three sisters who have huge, very realistic Victorian dollhouse in which their dolls have real potted plants and little tiny pots and pans that the girls make them play with every day. The girls decide to have a Christmas party and decorate a tiny tree that all of their friends and their dolls admire. They put up their hair with little flowers and feathers and go to watch a marionette show before going to bed in their comfortable bedrooms.
It was just so wonderful to me that dolls could live such a realistic life- everything in real life was replicated to smaller proportions, and they even did normal things like write letters to other dolls who wrote back to them. It was a really amazing idea.

Enjoy the site! If you have any more questions, feel free to email me at:
ourdolls@ourdolls.net

gretagothard@ourdolls.net