Remember Tiger Beat magazine? Sean McNamara is the Tiger Beat of Hollywood, and he knows his audience. He's directed 13 films, delivered television hits such as "That's So Raven" and "Even Stevens" to Disney and was astute enough to give youngsters named Jessica Alba, Shia LaBeouf and Hilary Duff some of their first big roles. Still, when McNamara was approached about making a live-action film based on the wildly successful dolls called Bratz, he had to admit he was out of touch.

"I have to be honest, I had never heard of these toys. So I did research." McNamara trundled off to Toys R Us with his 5-year-old son. "We checked out the Thomas the Train aisle, and then I went looking for Bratz. I was blown away. There were two full walls of Bratz stuff. But when I saw them I thought, 'These aren't cute dolls — they look like sluts.'"

And there you have it, the unique challenge of McNamara's new film, "Bratz: The Movie," which opened Friday.

Like the filmmakers behind "Transformers," McNamara and company are looking for an instant audience by riding a hugely successful brand name from the toy stores up to the silver screen. The movie they have made is a fairly wholesome affair, but the brand they picked clearly has a checkered past. Simply put, parents pay for the movie tickets, and a lot of parents think the Bratz dolls look like 10-inch-tall hoochie mamas.

The dolls have dewy lips, fishnet stockings and barely-there miniskirts — a creep-out factor for a lot of moms. Earlier this year, a report from the American Psychological Association mentioned the Bratz dolls by name and said "it is worrisome when dolls designed specifically for 4- to 8-year-olds are associated with an objectified adult sexuality."

COMPLETE MAKEOVER

Those young doll owners may not recognize their beloved Yasmin, Jade, Sasha and Cloe when they sit down in the theater with a bucket of popcorn. The film gives the Bratz a complete makeover that takes them from nightclub sexpots to flirty schoolgirls — it's like watching a retrospective of Britney Spears music videos in reverse.

Like the dolls, the film characters are four BFFs (that's "best friends forever," but you knew that) who are ethnically diverse but share "a passion for fashion." Really, though, beyond that, the film has very little connection to the toys; in fact, the four main girls don't even call themselves "the Bratz" until the film is almost over.

"Bratz: The Movie" seems more indebted to "The Cheetah Girls," "High School Musical," "Clueless" and, oddly, the subversive "Heathers" than it does to its namesake source material. The name's the thing, though. The "Bratz" brand is stunningly potent; the dolls first caught the imagination of young girls in late 2001, and by the end of 2005 Bratz products had topped $2 billion in global sales.

There's plenty of bad blood between Mattel Inc., the maker of the venerable Barbie collection, and MGA Entertainment Inc., which makes the Bratz. There have been lawsuits and a nasty feud as MGA has cut into Barbie's plasticized hegemony, and the rivals vie for the hearts of girls with Internet social sites, fashion accessories, video games, lip gloss, cartoons on DVD, pajamas and CD players.

Barbie is country-club white (although she shares her shelf with plenty of diverse Barbie pals), while the Bratz are urban poly-hues. This makes it easy to assume that consumers are divided along race lines, but that assumption doesn't hold up all that well.

One of the big determining factors may be the age of the parents or elders buying the toys; if they were born in the hip-hop era, they are more likely to consider the toys to be cute versions of the MTV images of Mariah, Missy or Fergie, music artists they play in their car on the way to work.

Barbie is so not hip-hop.

EMPHASIZING DIVERSITY

The problem presented by "Bratz: The Movie" is that some loyalists may wonder if their sassy and urban heroes are sliding a bit toward the white, suburban Barbie ethos.

To keep the separation line clear, the filmmakers decided early on that a Barbie-esque character had to be the villain in the movie. The heavy in the film is student-body president Meredith, who is platinum blond, affluent, haughty and in possession of both nefarious plans to rule the school and a pampered pooch named (ahem) Paris.

Avi Arad has a unique point of view on this contemporary valley of the dolls. The Israeli-American made his name as a toy designer and executive of note in the 1980s and 1990s, and he worked on the Barbie line for a time. By the end of that decade, he was leading Marvel Enterprises, where he was instrumental in clearing the way for Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to see life as big-budget Hollywood films. Now Arad has his own production company, and he has been the driving force behind "Bratz: The Movie."

"The genius in Barbie is that they made her belong to no one," Arad said. "And she had an aura of perfection about her. But then the world changed. Perfection is imperfection."

Arad said "The Bratz are the X-Men for girls," an allusion to the struggle against the establishment and the outsiders' stigma that are key in the story of the mutant superheroes.

"The first thing I saw in them was diversity," Arad said. "I really liked the idea that they had a Latino girl, an Asian girl, an African-American girl and a lily-white kid. They show that your color is not going to set up your path in life. And I think that works because, among kids, it's becoming more and more of 'one world for a change.' The rest of us have a ways to go."

The actresses who play the Bratz are Nathalia Ramos, Logan Browning, Skyler Shaye and Janel Parrish — who grew up in Windward O'ahu. "... We've all become best friends," said Ramos, whose parents are a Spanish Catholic and an Australian Jew. "With my background, I can really relate to this character and the messages in this movie about diversity."

Arad said the images of diversity are to show that everyone is different, but the plot of the movie — four lifelong friends who are pulled apart by the rigidity of high school cliques but then reunite to find their own style and substance — shows that everyone is the same.

"This story is about remembering that friendship and self-identity and empowerment are what is important," Arad said.