For Head of Character Animation CJ Sarachene and producer Steven Schweickart, dailies on the DreamWorks project often saw calls for brighter, bolder, and ‘more glitter’ as they built on the hit TV show’s colorful vibrancy to create a fun, inviting film that celebrates the magic of play; now in theaters.
When CJ Sarachene and Steven Schweickart joined the Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie production crew, they knew they were in for some cat-tastic animation endeavors. But even they had no way to predict the amounts of color and glitter involved.
“If you're at all scared of color, you should avoid this movie,” notes Schweickart, producer on the film. “It's very colorful. That's what kids want. They want to see the glitter. And they want to be immersed.”
Based on the hit DreamWorks preschool series by Jennifer Twomey and Traci Paige Johnson, the hybrid live-action / 3DCG film follows Gabby (Laila Lockhart Kraner, reprising her role from the series) as she heads out on a road trip with her Grandma Gigi (four-time Grammy Award winner Gloria Estefan) to the urban wonderland of Cat Francisco. But when Gabby’s dollhouse, her most prized possession, ends up in the hands of an eccentric cat lady named Vera (Oscar nominee Kristen Wiig), Gabby sets off on an adventure through the real world to get the Gabby Cats back together and save the dollhouse before it’s too late.
Directed by Ryan Crego (executive producer of Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh, I Heart Arlo), the film is produced by Steven Schweickart (How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods, Kung Fu Panda 4), executive produced by Twomey and Johnson, and is now showing in U.S. theaters.
The all-star voice cast includes Saturday Night Live comedians Ego Nwodim, Kyle Mooney and Melissa Villaseñor, as well as Emmy nominee Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!, American Dad!), Jason Mantzoukas (Invincible, Big Mouth), and Fortune Feimster (Fortune Feimster: Crushing It, Velma). The award-winning Gabby’s Dollhouse series voice cast reprises their roles as Pandy Paws (Logan Bailey), CatRat (Donovan Patton), Cakey (Juliet Donenfeld), DJ Catnip (Eduardo Franco), Baby Box (Maggie Lowe), Kitty Fairy (Tara Strong) and more.
Check out the trailer:
The show’s Dollhouse Delivery Boxes and dollhouse party rooms have always been filled with colorful, glitterrific tiny surprises. But the movie took the show’s snazzy vibrancy to a whole new level. There’s a glitter portal, fairy caves full of glittering rainbow gems, luminous undersea worlds, shimmering ice cream mountains, star-lit kitty clouds and, of course, very glittery pink kitty ears.
“It was a running joke when we were in our dailies,” shares Sarachene, head of character animation. “It was like, ‘More glitter! We need to put some glitter over there!’ It’s all about the glitter and the fun and bringing in the audience and making them feel like this is their old friend, but the world is just bigger and better and wider and brighter.”
Schweickart adds, “A lot of credit goes to our production designer Marcelo Vignali and our art director Ellen Jin. Ryan came up with those targeted locations where we wanted to take Gabby. But our art director and production designer, by way of Ryan’s guidance, really created those rich worlds. Plus, we didn’t want to break what was working. Gabby’s Dollhouse is all about the magic of play and that needed to be encouraged. The challenge was to take a TV show that’s book-ended by a girl talking to a camera in her room, give that camera a personality and have it show a point of view that’s cinematic and exciting.”
When Gabby shrinks down to dollhouse size in the film, the camera opens up ground-level worlds in tall grass, forests, rivers and magical caverns. As Gabby and the cats experience many of these environments from this point of view for the first time, it’s a larger-than-life experience that’s more mesmerizing than daunting.
“When we were shooting the scene where we had to shrink Gabby down in Vera’s house, a big issue for us was that we could only get these cameras so low to the ground,” explains Schweickart. “Our VFX supervisor, Scott McKee started trying early to figure out how to solve those problems. We would take a camera out on the DreamWorks campus and get really low, as close as we could to the ground, to find new ways to film our fountains and landscapes. A lot of the shots in the film are inspired by macro photography, and the work the VFX team pulled off with those shots is really amazing. I’m particularly proud of the gnomes sequence, which is almost an entirely CG environment. We didn’t shoot it, but we made it look like we did.”
A trait of macro photography isn’t just close-ups, but dramatic uses of light. Schweickart says the crew made the most of sun-lit “bokeh,” the way a wide aperture lens renders out-of-focus points of light. This helped the worlds in the film feel large and magical rather than spotlighted and intimidating.
“We've got bokeh duking it out with glitter throughout the movie,” says Schweickart. “But we had to make sure you weren’t choking on either one when those emotional scenes came into play. The first time we see Gabby cry, she’s sitting on this bookshelf and there’s bokeh around her but it’s very soft. It’s a balance we were always measuring.”
There was also a lot of balance in the heightened character designs for Gabby and the dollhouse cats.
“One of the biggest challenges of designing the characters for the film was that now we have mouth cavities,” notes Sarachene. “In the show, they are almost like paper cutouts. Gabby never had a profile before, but she also never had teeth. It was something I didn’t notice until I started working on this project.”
There actually was a brief discussion about leaving the teeth out of Gabby’s film design but that idea didn’t survive long. “It didn’t look right,” says Sarachene. “It works in that flat style but not when we’re giving her this elevated look.”
Getting the eyes right on Gabby, as well as the other characters, was also one of the more tedious tasks.
“The eyes are the most important because they convey a lot of what the character’s feeling and thinking,” explains Sarachene. “But we wanted to keep them simple as well. So, things like the eye highlights had to be just right.”
She adds, “The setups and the controls were very simple, so that we didn't exaggerate the characters and squash and stretch because we wanted to retain that very simple, charming look. For example, Gabby’s eyes look more painted on and, when her mouth is moving, it doesn’t affect too much around it. We didn’t want wrinkles around the eyes or on her forehead. We wanted her to feel like a doll and not a tiny, animated human.”
Even the folds on the Gabby Cats and Gabby’s shirts and pants had to be simple.
“We had to make sure that when the characters bent their arms or legs, those folds had to look clean,” says Sarachene. “There was a lot of back and forth on it all. We were constantly fighting with rigging. And a lot of our animators had never seen the show. So, some were familiar with the characters but not to the extent that they were after we finished this film.”
But as challenging as the film was, Schweickart and Sarachene both say the creative teams had a blast working on the project and didn’t mind arm-wrestling rigs and being buried in glitter.
“I had such a great experience on the show,” says Sarachene. “Everybody was all in the craft box. And Ryan really did a great job of allowing us to explore our inner child and just have some fun with it. Because of all this stuff that's put on us as artists, sometimes we lose sight of the bottom line, which is to know and entertain our audience. And to throw in that magic of play and really have fun with it. So, yes, I would be up for doing something like this again.”
Schweickart adds, “Like I said, this movie isn’t just about kids. It's about getting adults on the floor and playing as much as kids. We certainly did.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
