‘Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie’ Review: A Candy-Colored Toy Story That Looks Good Enough to Eat

A Golden Gate Bridge that’s a glowing shade of lavender. A cupcake that cries not tears but sprinkles. A psychedelic Day-Glo underwater dance-pop number that’s like Busby Berkeley meets “Bubble Guppies.” A set of miniature cat friends so neatly decorated they look like they were acquired on Etsy. A winter wonderland made entirely of frosting, with pink cotton-candy clouds and a donut raft and giant Gummy worms that arrive with the momentousness of the sandworms in “Dune.”

I could tell you that “Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie” is all about how Gabby (Laila Lockhart Kraner), who is now old enough to leave her kiddie dreams behind, teams up with her girlhood kitty friends, the Gabby Cats, to take control of the Dollhouse back from Vera (Kristen Wiig), a high-camp, high-vamp cat lady who has lost touch with the child within. I could tell you about how the movie, which bounces off the idea that playthings will feel abandoned when their child owners grow up, is like “Toy Story” meets “Trolls” meets a confectionary version of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” (I should add that it’s wispy enough to make each of those look like a Dickens novel.)

Really, though, “Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie” is about the textures — the fun of spending 90 minutes in a child’s universe that feels like it wasn’t so much animated as baked. Going into the movie, I knew nothing of the DreamWorks Animation series that premiered on Netflix in 2021. But by the time “Gabby’s Dollhouse” was over, I felt like the Gabby Cats were my friends too. The movie, make no mistake, is a genial throwaway that skitters through incidents with a G-rated innocuousness that makes it perfect for a very pint-sized demo. Yet the design of it is captivating, and so, in a minor way, is the affection with which the film’s director, Ryan Crego, embraces childhood things.

Gabby starts out as a live human, played by the series’ star, Laila Lockhart Kraner, who is now 17, but it’s a bit awkward having someone who looks like they’re getting ready to apply to college interfacing with three-inch-high cat toys. So as Gabby embarks on a road trip with her Grandma Gigi (Gloria Estefan) to the city of Cat Francisco, she becomes a girlish animated version of herself. Standouts in the cat-boutique vocal cast include Donovan Patton as the acerbic CatRat, Julien Donenfield as Cakey the cupcake, and Maggie Lowe as the innocent Baby Box, who’s got a head like a small house.

As for Kristen Wiig, in white hair and a purple turban and an outfit dominated by billowy purple leather sleeves, she does a version of the stylish misanthropic kitsch camping that has served actors from Emma Thompson in “Cruella” to Gal Gadot in “Snow White.” Wiig’s Vera, the CEO of a kitty-litter company, isn’t such a villain — her crime is that she’s forgotten how to play and wants to turn the Gabby Cats into collectibles (which, in a way, is just what they are).

The antagonist who comes to the fore is Chumsley (Jason Mantzoukas), the orange cat with pink yarn for whiskers, who was so hurt when Vera grew up and abandoned him that he has become a wounded megalomaniac, speaking in a lisp of anger. The resolution of this that takes place in that winter wonderland, atop a rickety footbridge made of sugar wafers, is mildly touching, though it’s such a knockoff of the “Toy Story” films that that becomes part of the candified simulacrum of it all.

In a funny way, kiddie adventures where animation meets live action are becoming more and more about their own world-building. “Gabby’s Dollhouse” is the definition of slight, but like “A Minecraft Movie” it invites the audience to imagine itself into a universe where objects have to be imagined to life. The Dollhouse, a four-story Victorian with a shingled roof topped by oversize kitty ears, is portrayed as an ever-expanding attic of wonder. You never know what, or who, you’re going to find in there, or how your next friend could be turned into a piece of exquisite design, or vice versa.