Conventional showbiz wisdom advises against working with children or animals, especially dogs. They’re cuter than starlets, more unmanageable than directors and likely to appear in saccharine B-grade fare that does no one’s career any good.

Hotel for Dogs doesn’t just defy that conventional wisdom; it spits in its eye, tweaks its nose and runs off giggling maniacally. For any audience member willing to suspend a little disbelief and indulge their inner 11-year-old, this urban fable provides a terrific giddy thrill. If you’ve ever wanted to free all the animals in the pound and run wild in the streets with them, then this is the movie for you.

The premise is the stuff of a thousand movies of the week; it’s the execution that sets Hotel for Dogs apart. Plucky brother-sister orphans Andi (Emma Roberts of Nancy Drew) and Bruce (Jake T. Austin of “Wizards of Waverly Place”) are struggling to stay together in the foster system and secretly keep their dog, the scruffy and preternaturally intelligent Friday. But even with Andi’s con skills and Bruce’s fantastic erector-set creations, they’re still on the brink of losing the dog when they stumble on two other dogs in an abandoned hotel. A neighbor and two opportunistic pet-shop employees bring in more dogs and more resources, and a surrogate family is born.

It’s at this point, when the dog gags and gadgets start to fly, that Hotel for Dogs distinguishes itself. Unlike most save-the-strays fantasies, this one spends a laudable amount of time on the real-life logistics of keeping a large number of animals. There are cute Rube Goldberg devices to keep the dogs fed and entertained, true. But Hotel for Dogs spends an equal amount of time on the, er, sanitation side of the problem, and with no more bathroom humor than necessary. There are references to 60-pound bags of kibble and an elaborate waste-disposal system that sets up a strangely rewarding poop gag, if such a thing exists. (Let’s just say it involves lots of little blue plastic bags.)

Similarly, Friday’s funny business never quite goes beyond what a real bloody-minded terrier might come up with. And while director Thor Freudenthal cut his teeth on animation (some of his earliest credits involve visual effects on the Stuart Little films), he never lets the fantasy and wish-fulfillment elements of the tale get away from him.

The creepy old hotel never stops looking like an old hotel, even as the lighting brightens and the grime is scrubbed away. Bruce’s elaborate contraptions are always noisy, kinetic and wildly entertaining, but they’re also convincingly constructed out of real-looking junk; no psychedelic kindergarten paint jobs here. The radio-controlled sheep (there’s a collie involved) straddle the line between cute and demonic in a way only real 11-year-olds can usually pull off.

The dogs are, of course, impeccably trained, and even the mob scenes come across as effortless, a minor miracle by itself. But perhaps the biggest surprise in the movie is that its human stars play their own parts so well. Roberts demonstrates the same nuanced grasp of kiddie fare she displayed in Nancy Drew, never allowing her scenes to dip too deeply into sarcasm or soar too high on wings of stupid credulity. Austin avoids the precocity clichés and comes across as a convincingly uncertain boy who wishes he could fix his life with a screwdriver.

Fellow dog-rescuers Troy Gentile, Kyla Pratt and Johnny Simmons never let their stock characters slide all the way into stereotype. Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon are the requisite terrible foster parents who lock the kids out of the kitchen cupboards and rehearse glam rock in the living room; their songs are memorably awful. Don Cheadle stands out in the role of a social worker trying to keep the system from chewing the kids up and spitting them in different directions; his understated performance is pitch-perfect.

It says something that Lois Duncan, the author of the original book who was horrified to see one of her novels turned into I Know What You Did Last Summer, has been so enthusiastically supportive of Hotel for Dogs. She was banned from Summer’s set; in this movie, she appears in a crowd scene and chats happily on the DVD’s bonus materials.

Those bonus materials on the widescreen DVD (DreamWorks Home Entertainment, MSRP: $29.99) are satisfying, too. In addition to the standard making-of doc (“A Home for Everyone: The Making of Hotel for Dogs”), commentary by Roberts and Austin, trailer and deleted scenes, there are more esoteric features. Short docs on the movie’s gadgets and the selection of the dogs share space with a unique look at the use of sound in the movie--as in how little of it was usable with 20 trainers shouting at the dogs from off-camera. And, in keeping with the film’s message, there is also an appeal from the Pedigree Foundation asking viewers to adopt dogs from animal shelters.

All in all, Hotel for Dogs is a smart, loveable mutt of a movie—a perfect pet.

Hotel for Dogs is now available on DVD.