Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie continues its show’s legacy, following yet another one of Gabby’s adventures with her sentient toy cats. While the majority of the movie is innocuous, parents may be uncomfortable with some magical moments, allusions to Eastern spirituality and light crudities.
Gabby has a secret, one that all children know and many adults forget: how to play.
For Gabby, it’s as simple as tugging on her cat ears, squeezing her plush cat Pandy Paws and shrinking down into her magical dollhouse.
Gabby’s gone on plenty of adventures with the sentient toy cats who live in the dollhouse: She’s gone swimming with MerCat, danced with DJ Catnip and caused a ruckus with CatRat. And for their next adventure, Grandma Gigi plans to load up the dollhouse and bring Gabby to spend some time at her home in Cat Francisco.
When they get there, Gabby rushes inside with her Grandma. And the ever-mischievous CatRat, impatient to get inside, decides to loosen the ratchet strap keeping the dollhouse in the trailer.
Gabby can only watch as the dollhouse—with her cat friends inside—rolls away down the street.
It lands right in the middle of an outdoor market … and attracts the hungry eyes of Vera, an adult cat-obsessed collector who simply adores the dollhouse’s design.
Another intrigued girl asks Vera if she’d like to play with the dollhouse. Vera scoffs. Dollhouses like this one aren’t meant for play. They’re meant to be collected. Put on display. Never touched.
And before the girl can interject, Vera loads up the dollhouse and speeds away with it.
Elsewhere, Gabby desperately searches for where her friends could have rolled. And inside the dollhouse, her cat friends wonder just what kind of playless person’s clutches they’ve fallen into.
We find out that Vera was once like Gabby. She even had her own toy cat, Chumsley. But as Vera grew up, she gained more responsibilities and became too busy for play. Instead, she’s now moved on to a more “refined” and adult hobby: buying collectibles. Both she and Chumsley tell Gabby that she’ll eventually abandon her toys when she gets older, too.
However, Gabby helps Vera and Chumsley to see that while growing up isn’t a bad thing, it also doesn’t mean that adults must lose that creative and joyful spark—even adults can find time to play.
When Gabby and friends come across places where other cats have filled with new, sentient life (more on that below), they decide to help the new creatures by improving their homes or teaching them how to be independent.
Gabby sets off to rescue her cat friends. And when she needs some additional help and guidance, Grandma Gigi sprints to her aid.
There are some innately magical elements in Gabby’s Dollhouse, since the plot requires Gabby to wear cat ears, speak a spell and shrink down to play with her toy cats. The toys themselves are sentient thanks to the dollhouse’s magic, and they likewise bring other inanimate objects to life too through singing and touch (not unlike how Forky from Toy Story 4 comes to life). And when a suddenly sentient garden gnome recalls his time before sentience, he describes it as “infinite darkness.”
Each of these moments comes with rainbow sparkles and glitter meant to represent magic. On a couple of occasions, viewers are encouraged to assist Gabby in getting her magic to work: “Grab someone you love and think of the most magical way you like to play,” she asks viewers on one occasion. At another moment, a magic-based tornado causes chaos, causing Chumsley to say that he didn’t realize too much magic could be a bad thing.
In one scene, Vera practices something resembling Eastern meditation, striking sound bowls, lighting incense and sitting cross-legged in front of Buddha-style cat statues. She hopes the practice will “invoke inner peace.”
Vera practices yoga with her cat, and her cat performs a “Keanu” pose, which involves the cat balancing on its tail as glory shines around its body. Someone describes the dollhouse as being “like a teeny tiny cathedral from Barcelona.”
Chumsley takes off his bowtie (his only form of clothing) and yells, “Naked kitty in the house!” Others chant “naked kitty” along with him. Later, Chumsley says that he plans to play his “booty off.”
Cakey exposes his naked marshmallow rear to the camera, slightly browned from a fire.
Commenting on Vera’s style, someone says she’s “got that meow-chicka-meow-meow.” As he passes Vera, Pandy Paws states that he feels underdressed compared to her, and he uses his bag to cover where his crotch would be.
Gabby and a couple of her toy cats fall from a high place. While rolling, the dollhouse narrowly avoids being struck by cars.
We hear exclamations of “Holy craft!” “Oh my gosh!” and “Dang it!”
Grandma Gigi makes herself a miniature margarita.
Vera sniffs a cat toy while looking out the window, and when she sees the animated cats fly by, she quickly tosses the toy away as if it caused her to hallucinate. One existential gnome speaks with a stereotypical stoner voice.
We hear the occasional sound of flatulence; when Chumsley activates his broken speaker box, we hear it make a sound like passing gas. Chumsley says, “It sounds like indigestion, which I also have.” An advertisement for kitty litter includes a rainbow, glitter-covered poop emoji.
Grandma Gigi stops in Las Vegas to gamble on slot machines.
Though made for kids, there’s a lesson for adults in Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie, too.
It’s something similar to one of the lessons we learned in The LEGO Movie: don’t forget about play. Gabby’s a few years older here than she was when her Netflix TV show began, and she’s excited to be seen as a grown up. But growing up brings responsibilities than distract from playtime (in Vera’s case, permanently). The charge, then, is to learn how to balance adulthood with those times of play.
And while we’re on the topic of movie comparisons, the plot of the film takes a page from Toy Story 3. For half the film, it centers on a toy that feels abandoned by its owner and resolves to never allow a human to abandon him ever again. The movie’s premise, of course, allows humans and toys to speak with one another—and it leads to a couple sweet moments of reconciliation that young viewers can learn from and enjoy.
That magical premise might be the movie’s hardest selling point for some families, though fans of the TV series have probably already thought through that concern. For those who are still watching and thinking about this movie, a nod toward Eastern meditation and a few childish crudities may nevertheless put a damper on the otherwise innocent proceedings here.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
