Prowling the Streets of Cat Francisco with ‘Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie’s Director & Head of Character Animation

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“We wanted the story to be expansive and challenging enough for the big screen as well as emotionally gratifying. It had to be something that the parents would want to see in the theater along with their kids.”

— Writer-director Ryan Crego

If you share your home with a preschooler, then you probably know all about a very popular girl named Gabby, her magical dollhouse and her nine delightful cats. The brainchild of Blue’s Clues creators Traci Paige Johnson and Jennifer Twomey, the interactive show Gabby’s Dollhouse has been a huge success for Netflix since its first meow in January of 2021.

This fall, DreamWorks Animation’s kitty empire expands to to the big screen with Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie, a live-action/animation hybrid feature directed by Ryan Crego (Arlo the Alligator Boy, Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh, Sanjay and Craig). The colorful new movie finds Gabby (Laila Lockhart Kraner) and her grandmother (Gloria Estefan) on a road trip to the city of Cat Francisco, where their magical dollhouse is nabbed by an eccentric cat lady (Kristen Wiig). The resourceful young girl has to come up with a plan to get her Gabby Cats all back together before it’s too late and the furballs hit the fan.

A Family Favorite

Crego, who began work on the movie about two and half years ago, says he was initially drawn to the project because his young daughter was a big fan of the original show. “I thought, wow, it would be so cool if I could turn my daughter’s favorite show into a fun movie,” he says. “Because they were asking me to be involved it meant that they were looking at making some tweaks, because I’m not a preschool person. I started out working on the Shrek movies at the studio, so my background is in comedy.”

He says his goal was to keep the integrity of the show while expanding its audience. “In addition to my daughter, my younger son, who is three now, became a fan of the show over the course of the movie’s production,” Crego points out. “So, I had my own little test audience at home, and I could see which characters they loved and how they reacted to them. I wanted to make sure the movie stayed honest and pure to all the show’s characters.”

The director also emphasizes that he wanted to make the project expansive and challenging enough for the big screen. “The story had to be emotionally gratifying,” he explains. “It had to be something that the parents would want to see in the theater, because I see myself as the target audience: I’m that parent who’s going to take my kids to the movie. So, we set out to make a comedy that put Gabby and these characters in scenarios that are too big for them, and we made them funny, crazy and exciting. The third act is a wild set piece in a world of giant gummy worms, crashing through a candy strip river and riding on donuts. It’s a big action scene, but it’s done in a very playful, imaginative way. Overall, the goal was to make something that would work for the core audience as well as something that the parents would also enjoy, as well as the older siblings who would like to see the continuation of Gabby’s story.”

Just like the show, the movie blends live-action footage with animated characters and sequences. According to the studio, around 51% of the movie was fully animated, 27% was hybrid (including VFX animation) and 21% was live action (mostly shot in Vancouver). The bulk of the animation was handled by CGCG studio in Taiwan, which also helps with the animation for the TV series. Cinesite (Montreal) and Assemblage (India) were in charge of animation for VFX, while rendering and compositing were done at FX3X (Macedonia). The live-action portions were handled by Catchlight in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Retaining the integrity of the show’s character design and shape language was also high on the creative team’s priority list. “We also needed to make sure that these animated characters could live in the real world,” says Crego. “So, that meant special attention had to be paid to the textures and surfacing and the way their eyes were going to be reflective. These characters have wonderful surfaces on them: For example, Mercat gets this great luminescent subsurface glow. We wanted to make sure there’s something tangible and textural in each one of them, so we could bring them in and out of their animated dollhouse world. And then, they come out and will be running around in the city — they needed to look like they belonged there and not look like cartoon stickers. Our head of character animation CJ Sarachene really upped the ante and brought so much life to these characters. She added so much acting and beauty to these simple designs.”

Sarachene, whose many impressive credits include Hop, Yogi Bear and Star Trek: Prodigy, says when the characters are seen in their dollhouse, the animation is pushed a little bit. “We wanted to make sure the characters felt like they were the same ones in and out of their dollhouse,” she notes. “A big part of that is their miniature size. We wanted to make the audience feel like they could reach out and grab these little dolls and play with them. At the same time, we wanted to keep the animation simple to harken back to what the TV show is. We had to keep that fine balance and not overcomplicate the emotions. The series gave us such a wealth of characters and back stories, so we just went with that. We also had a really good time with the new characters and had a lot of fun with the magic of play and bringing them to life.”

Interactive Kitty Fun

Another distinctive quality of the movie is its interactive element, where the audience is invited to participate in the fun. “I think of it as a great Disneyland ride, where you take your families and everyone can experience the fun of being inside the story,” says Crego. “You’re not just being presented this story, and you’re actually involved in it. Many of these elements like the dancing or clapping are engrained in the show. Gabby talks to the camera, so it felt pretty natural for us. I tried to key in on things like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where the mood is fun and cheeky. You want everyone to participate, just like when the audience in the Peter Pan theater show claps to show that they believe in fairies [to help Tinker Bell fly].”

Crego says his most important audience — his two children — have already seen an early version of the film (with rough animation), and really loved it. He adds, “I’ve seen the movie with family audiences three times now, and I wish I could see like that every time I watch it, because that’s where you really get to experience the magic of what’s happening on the screen. You get to watch kids engage and their parents engage with them. It’s the kind of silliness and fun which leads to everyone walking out of the theater with huge smiles on their faces. That’s the biggest reward for me. You only have a handful of years when you can share experiences like this — your kids’ first movies — with them. It’s such a special time, full of innocence and such joy, and that’s what’s really valuable.”

DreamWorks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie will purr its way into audiences’ hearts on September 26.