Like a lot of 12-year-olds, she might want to be a veterinarian when she grows up.

"I love animals, and I've had dogs, cats, a turtle," she says. "And it's weird, but I collect elephants. All kinds. Not the living kind. Not yet."

She just joined the Girl Scouts, and she says "Oh my gosh!" a lot. Especially about "American Idol" or the iPod she just lost.

Her favorite books: "'Anne of Green Gables.' Oh, and the Max Quick (fantasy) books. I'm on the last one of those, so I'm kind've sad about that."

She has the date of her next Disney World visit emblazoned on her calendar.

"December! We're coming down for the candlelight ceremony during the holidays!"

It's easy to forget when somebody already has copped her first Oscar nomination that we're dealing with a little girl. But Abigail Breslin is all girl — or, to borrow from the title of her new movie, all "American Girl."

The imp who was the title character in "Little Miss Sunshine," which earned her an Oscar nod a couple of years back, has something special, a "guilelessness," noted a Hollywood Reporter reviewer in praising "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," Breslin's new movie. She was the guileless center of a pack of feuding, struggling, unhappy adults in "Sunshine." She was perfectly believable as a desert island girl who would, of course, e-mail her favorite adventure novelist for help in the spring's sleeper hit, "Nim's Island." And as a Depression-era child who longs to write for a newspaper, she brings that pluck to bear in "Kit Kittredge," too.

It was, she admits, the first movie she had to do "homework" for.

"I didn't know much of anything about the Great Depression," Breslin says. "But my grandmother grew up during that, and she told me all these things about bread lines, how hard things were. And I learned so much more about it when I made this movie. All those people struggling to just have enough to eat, it's hard to believe.

"The message of our film is about family and friends pulling together in hard times, which is what a lot of people did back then."

Breslin might have been drawn to the fact that the film is a tie-in to the popular "American Girl" dolls and books about girls from different eras in American history. She admits that she "liked the idea that there was a monkey in it." But the historical setting threw her, just a bit. And we're not talking about "wearing (1930s) sweater outfits in the heat" because the scene she was playing was supposed to be in the winter.