On her 11th birthday, Marnie McBride goes to a junk shop with her father. There, the shopkeeper gifts her a shoebox containing four animal figurines, who have the ability to spring to life on her command. Marnie now has to deal with the struggles of balancing her life between adventuring with the collectively named “Shoebox Zoo” animals on a quest given to her by a great wizard, and her day-to-day life as a schoolgirl, on top of having to cope with the loss of her recently deceased mother.