Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 story The Jungle Book introduced us to Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. The Boxtrolls, loosely based on Alan Snow’s 2005 story Here Be Monsters, introduces us to Eggs, a boy raised by subterranean trolls known for wearing boxes – hence their name, Boxtrolls.
Like Coraline and ParaNorman before it, the film was hatched out of artisanal Oregon-based animation studio Laika, where Knight serves as president. And like those earlier features, which managed more successfully to juggle perfect lighting in an animated feature, this one appears brave enough to target a more limited audience than most wide-release CG-animated movies.
The latest from ace stop-motion studio Laika is a deliciously scrungy adaptation of Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters!, complete with the kind of pustulent facial contortions from which most kids’ movies would run screaming.
The film takes place in a town called Cheesebridge, an extravagant little place obsessed with cheese and where the common people live in fear of the Boxtrolls, mysterious little mutants who have a reputation for coming out at night and kidnapping children. Of course, the only thing these creatures actually do is scavenge the town’s garbage for little trinkets and gears that they can then use for their elaborate underground inventions; they’re a kindly, communal race of engineering savants. As if to illustrate their innocence and simplicity, the Boxtrolls wear discarded boxes; their names, like Fish, Fragile, Sparky and Shoe, reflect what’s written on those boxes. Among them, however, is a young human boy, Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright), who was adopted by them as a baby – an event that may have been the impetus for the child-napping defame.
Hated by the humans above, who have been told that boxtrolls eat children these bug-eating beasties are actually sweet, industrious souls. They chatter like the Despicable Me minions, turn the junk they filch from the streets into marvelous gadgets and, when it’s bedtime, assemble themselves communally into a neat, 16-boxtroll cube.
After the bizarro-world domestic fantasy of Coraline and the boy-who-talks-to-zombies ParaNorman, the new film, directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable, lets the Laika animators run rampant and have ghoulish fun.
Somehow the film never gathers much steam, shuffling from one busy set-piece to the next without fostering investment in characters good or bad. While Dario Marianelli’s robust score spells drama and action, even the indispensable roller-coasteresque chase scenes fail to build excitement.
The work of the voice cast is fine but rarely interesting. Kingsley’s Snatcher is a particularly joyless villain, not least of all when he’s grotesquely bloated from cheese intolerance. Actors like Toni Collette, Tracy Morgan and Simon Pegg could have been better utilised; the most entertaining contributions come from Ayoade and Frost as Snatcher’s incongruously cerebral sidekicks. Questioning the notion of heroism and the lines separating the righteous from wrongdoers, they wonder if Boxtrolls “understand the duality of good and evil.”
Splendidly inventive and outrageously squishy, Boxtrolls features more than enough carnivalesque weirdness (the sight of a cheese-inflamed Archibald is beyond monstrous) to make the faint-hearted feel queasy. The visuals are dazzling, the voices expressive, and the end-credits sequence offers a laugh-out-loud appraisal of the madness of the animators’ labour-intensive craft as the camera slowly zooms out showing Laika’s Knight working his magic on the life like clay models.
Production company: Laika
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Dee Bradley Baker, Steve Blum, Toni Collette, Jared Harris, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, Tracy Morgan, Simon Pegg
Directors: Anthony Stacchi, Graham Annable
Screenwriter: Irena Brignull, Adam Pava, based on Alan Snow’s book, Here Be Monsters!
Producers: David Bleiman Ichioka, Travis Knight
Director of photography: John Ashlee Prat
Production designer: Paul Lasaine
Costume designer: Deborah Cook
Music: Dario Marianelli
Editor: Edie Ichioka
Animation supervisor: Brad Schiff
Visual effects supervisors: Brian Van’t Hul, Steve Emerson
