
Sci-Fi & FantasyDramaAction & AdventureBBC One

Pilot
S1, E1
The Magic Is Awakened
7.7
TMDB
Shoebox Zoo is an urban fantasy TV series made in a collaboration between BBC Scotland and various Canadian television companies. It is mostly live-action, but with CGI used for the animal figurines. The show centers on the story of a young girl named Marnie McBride, who is given a shoebox containing four toy animals by a mysterious old man at a junk shop, as a gift for her 11th birthday. These magical toys have the power to come alive on Marnie’s command, and they’re on a quest to find an ancient book that once belonged to a great and powerful wizard.

The Making of Shoebox Zoo
2 reviews · 1 fan
1 fresh · 0 rotten
I discovered Shoebox Zoo quite recently, nearly 18 years after it originally aired (as of the time this review was originally written). Truthfully, I went into it with very low expectations, and was very hesitant to check it out at first, but my curiosity was piqued and so I ended up deciding to watch it. Much to my shock, I ended up enjoying it quite a lot, so much so that I’d even rank it among my favorite shows of all time. As such, I wanted to make this review in order to share my thoughts on some of the main aspects of the show, among other things. To start things off, I’d like to talk about the central focus of the show, the titular “shoebox animals”, since I firmly believe the show did a tremendous job with them. They’re incredibly fun characters and add so much life to just about every scene they’re in, and while they primarily adhere to one defining personality trait, on top of initially being quite secretive and mistrustful, each of them goes through their own little character arcs (with some being more subtle then others), making them feel quite fleshed out by the end. The animals are further bolstered by the clever editing, superb voice talents and surprisingly great CGI animation that go into making them possible in the first place. Everything is so well done to the point that, for a majority of the scenes, I genuinely had a hard time believing that the CGI crea…
Title
Shoebox Zoo
Released
2004
Rated
TV-PG
Region of Origin
Canada, United Kingdom
Original Audio
English
Show Type
Scripted
Runtime
25 min
Network
BBC One