For most of us, the Playboy Mansion — that bastion of unabashed bimboism, old man lechery and rock & roll debauchery — is hardly synonymous with childhood magic.

Despite this, director Fred Wolf spins an unlikely fairy tale out of his recent film “The House Bunny,” which takes place in a universe where the Playboy Mansion is every girl’s ultimate “Happily Ever After” and Hugh Hefner doubles as both Prince Charming and Fairy Godmother to his girls.

Ejected from this Eden as the result of an evil plot by another house bunny, aging mansion resident (“59 in Bunny Years”) Shelley Darlington (Anna Faris) must use the tricks she has learned from her life as a bunny to establish herself in the “real” world where she is regarded by most as simply a prostitute.

Born from the screenwriting duo responsible for Elle Woods, the indomitable protagonist of “Legally Blonde,” Shelley is determined to bring “pink thinking” to bear on male-dominated institutions — in this case, the Greek university system. Finding sororities the next best thing to the Playboy Mansion, Shelley attempts to win the role of House Mother to one of the more respectable houses on campus but is denied due to her slutty appearance. Told she has a chance at the soon to be extinct Zeta Alpha Zeta House, she goes there only to find seven “weird girls” who are skeptical of Shelley’s brand of femininity until it proves useful in attracting the attention of Greek boys. This attention must be sustained in order for the Zetas to keep their charter by finding thirty new pledges in just a few weeks, a deadline that will motivate most of the plot’s ensuing action.

Like the seven dwarves on which these characters are based, each Zeta is endowed with a striking physical or personality trait, the most annoying being a near-term pregnancy. More inspired portrayals include Emma Stone (“Superbad”) exhibiting Michael Cera-like awkwardness and geek charm, celebrity spawn Rumer Wilson as a girl who uses her bedazzled body brace as a kind of security blanket and finally the “grumpy” feminist Mona, played by Kat Dennings (“Charlie Bartlett”) who undergoes a makeover in the name of sociological research.

Interestingly, the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” frame has been explored rather recently in the 2007 Amanda Bynes vehicle “Sydney White,” which also relied upon a Greek backdrop. Another comparison can be made to Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy “Ball of Fire,” in which the girlfriend of a gangster intrudes upon the work of seven absent-minded professors. But unlike these two other films, “Snow White” is of the same sex as the “dwarves” in this configuration, allowing female rather than male camaraderie to take center stage.

Although the female bonding in this film, which revolves around shared beauty practices, is frequently presented as empowering, their solidarity often appears as a mere accident of the girls’ aspirations to achieve success in heterosexual romantic relationships. Surprisingly, it is Shelley who has the most boy trouble in the film, as she struggles to capture the heart of “nice guy” senior-center worker Oliver, played by Colin Hanks. Shelley must abandon her bunny ways for his sake, and thus the montage of her charges rapidly transforming into newly minted, though admittedly quirky, hotties is countered with another montage documenting Shelley’s forays into book learning and more modest apparel.

However, unlike the Zeta girls whose new self-presentations find an immediate audience, Shelley’s temporary conversion into a sexy librarian is mostly just an excuse for some of the film’s more outrageous acts of physical comedy, distracting in their cartoonish quality. As the audience will learn, these efforts are mostly unnecessary — Shelley’s combination of goofiness and unbelievable ditzy-ness (expertly embodied by Faris) is what makes her attractive to others and also very human.

In the end, it is the Zetas who must change — this despite the film’s final message about the fleeting nature of physical beauty, delivered by Shelley at a Greek council meeting. Although she champions girls’ friendships, these more uplifting realities cannot conceal the obvious double standard of this film, as compared with its comedic peers: Shelley’s interventions constitute a definite upgrade for the girls, while their male counterparts (in the films of Judd Apatow, for example) are loveable so long as they remain such adorable losers.

Come see this film if you are interested in keeping tabs on gender relations as they are presently being constructed within the context of classic Hollywood storytelling — and for Faris, who is delightfully watchable in this role.