Review: Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie is Kingdom Hearts for little girls who love glitter (and me)

Being an animation blogger means going to see a lot of movies where you might not expect to find a 35-year-old man in the audience. As I was trooping into the theater to catch Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie yesterday, I had to wonder what the families in the theater made of me. I started wondering if I should get a t-shirt announcing myself as an animation blogger, or if that would make me look weirder/more suspicious. Who can say?

I'm not familiar with the Gabby's Dollhouse show on Netflix, which has been on since 2021. I don't that I had even heard of it before this movie got announced. (I'm much more attuned to animated movies than shows, of which there are honestly too many to keep up with.) So diving into this movie was pretty wild. It falls into a category of movie that's one of my favorites: it made me feel a little crazy while I was watching it. This movie is so silly, so funny, so strange. I kept trying to ground myself in the lore, understand who all the characters are, and I mostly managed to, but at a certain point, you have to let go of that desire and just go with it.

The movie starts with a little flashback of Gabby as a little girl with an adorable lisp being gifted the eponymous dollhouse by her grandma Gigi (played a bit woodenly by Gloria Estefan). This dollhouse is pretty magnificent, and massive, with a cat-head shape to it, and with lots of adorable little cat figurines inside. Gabby has the power to sing a song and pinch her cat ears to shrink down and go inside the dollhouse, where all of the little figurines are alive, and her friends. The source of this magic doesn't really have an explanation, as far as I can tell.

So right out of the gate, I was like, okay, Gigi is a witch. And she's weirdly obsessed with cats. Maybe she's trying to indoctrinate Gabby into her tradition of occult furry identity. But it ends up that her cat obsession isn't weird, or even unique. This entire world is cat-based. In the present day of the film, Gigi picks Gabby up and drives her cross-country on a road trip where all of the state names are revealed to be cat-puns, like "Hississippi" and "Arizona But For Cats" (my first big laugh of the movie). They end up in Gigi's home city of Cat Francisco (less clever), where the Golden Gate Bridge is pink and cat-shaped. There's a Girl Scouts-esque group where they are also wearing cat outfits. Everything is about cats!

That revelation left me reeling a bit, but from that point on, I was so dialed in.

I think I should just right-out say that this is one of the funniest movies of the year. It's clearly made with care by very smart people, because this is ostensibly a movie for young girls, and it fully delivers on that front. It's full of glittery, vibrant colors; packed with catchy songs; features fourth-wall-breaking moments where the audience is asked to chime in and help the characters accomplish various feats. It's *ahem* catnip for its demographic. But this movie is also full of humor that older viewers will appreciate, a lot of hilarious (I assume) ad-libbing, semi-dark jokes, and goofy side characters. 

The voice cast includes comedic heavy-hitters like Fortune Feimster, Thomas Lennon, and Jason Mantzoukas (he has a particularly beefy role), and they all deliver plenty of laughs. But it is, of course, our queen Kristen Wiig who utterly runs away with the show. She is operating at the height of her comedic powers as the villainous Vera, a kitty litter mogul who ends up in possession of Gabby's dollhouse, and wants to treat it as a collectible rather than a toy. Vera used to know how to play when she was a kid, but she's left those childish ways behind her. Now she collects.

What Wiig does here is nothing short of a comedic master-class. She is so dialed-in, and dialed-up, and she had me howling with laughter. She looks incredible in her leathery costumes. She devours every line. She strikes physical comedy gold while doing yoga with her cat. She's as committed here as she is in masterpieces like Bridesmaids and Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar. It's one of my favorite performances of the year.

From the movie's trailer, I was wondering how much of this would actually be animated versus live-action, since the trailer leaned a bit more heavily into the latter. I'm happy to report that the majority of this (I would guess like 75%) is animated. When Gabby is shrunk down, she and the so-called Gabbycats are all animated, and usually in animated spaces (unless they're traipsing around Vera's house). The animation is the height of cuteness, full of bright colors and glittery effects. The characters are adorable, and imminently merchandisable. (Also, I would be remiss not to mention to very cool-looking wooden creatures who live in the garden, who are animated at a different frame rate, giving their movements a cool, jerky look. Very cool.)

And while Wiig's scenes are the highlight of the movie, Gabby's adventurous A-plot is no, slouch. She's basically doing a mini-Kingdom Hearts thing where she travels around Vera's house and yard locating various friends who have been strewn about. In each environment, she gets a new look, maybe a new power (like becoming a mermaid who can breathe underwater), and makes new friends. There's usually a musical number -- all catchy -- and also a god-like granting of life.

Yes, all of the Gabbycats apparently have the power to grant life to inanimate objects, and also to make new life spring forth. Drab, lifeless environments are suddenly teeming with flora and fauna. Stuffed animals and pencil toppers are suddenly moving around. It is insane. Where does this power come from?! Again, my mind was reeling.

The combination of Gabby's journey and Vera's backstory, and the way the two finally intersect, gives the movie an overall feeling of speed-running the Toy Story movies. There's even a sequence that's basically a play on "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2, but done a bit more cheekily. There's a nice theme about what it looks like to grow up, and how getting older doesn't mean having to lose your ability or desire to play. It's a nice message for kids -- getting older isn't scary -- and also for adults. Maybe it even made me feel more at peace about being a lone adult man at a children's movie. I haven't lost my inner child! I think the Gabbycats would be glad to have me there.