Review: “The Boxtrolls” – Thinking Outside the Box

The Boxtrolls cements Laika’s position in the animation industry as the studio most prone to quirky, slightly creepy fun and astonishingly meticulous stop-motion animation. Based on Alan Snow’s book Here Be Monsters, The Boxtrolls tells the unusual tale of a young boy adopted by the subterranean title creatures. While the movie seems much more conventional than the slightly outlandish plot synopsis of the novel, The Boxtrolls still possesses its own eccentric charms that set it apart strongly from most of its competition.

The Boxtrolls dwell beneath the streets of the city of Cheesebridge, but their harmless nocturnal expeditions to the surface to steal junk suddenly become much more menacing when they steal an infant in the opening minutes of the movie. In the aftermath, the unctuous Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) extracts a deal from the officious (and idiotic) Lord Portley-Rind, mayor of Cheesebridge: in return for eliminating the threat of the Boxtrolls from Cheesebridge, Snatcher will get a White Hat and entry into the upper echelons of power. Unknown to the citizens, the infant is being raised safely with the Boxtrolls, getting the name Eggs (and, eventually, a vocal performance by Isaac Hempstead-Smith) and a surrogate father in the Boxtroll named Fish (Dee Bradley Baker). The Boxtrolls specialize in turning junk from the surface into wonderously intricate and beautiful machinery, but their numbers begin to dwindle in a merciless onslaught led by Snatcher and his three henchmen, the entertaining duo Mr. Trout (Nick Frost) and Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade); and the psychotic Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan). Thus is the inevitable confrontation between Snatcher and Eggs established, but made more complex by the injection of Winnie Portley-Rind (Elle Fanning), the ignored daughter of Lord Portley-Rind who gradually becomes a link between the inhabitants of the surface and the Boxtrolls.

By now, the stop-motion craftsmanship of Laika is completely beyond question, and The Boxtrolls is another triumph in the development of their craft. In watching Laika’s output, I am reminded of the early days of Pixar, when each new movie was a showcase for impressively ambitious advances in rendering technology for about five minutes. Then the story would become compelling enough that you’d stop noticing the technology. Stop-motion animation tends to call more attention to itself than CGI by its slightly unreal nature, which will always be picked up by subconscious observation, but The Boxtrolls minimizes stop-motion’s trademark herky-jerky movement so much that it comes close to looking like CGI. This is ironic considering that The LEGO Movie spent non-trivial effort building CGI that deliberately looked like stop-motion animation.

In any event, The Boxtrolls is easily Laika’s most ambitious film yet, with the city of Cheesebridge dwarfing any of their earlier set pieces. Especially impressive are a few chase sequences, including a midnight pursuit that sends Eggs, Fish, and Shoe hurtling over rooftops while Snatcher’s gang pursues on their rattletrap car. The big-scale battle that’s the core of the movie’s climax also has the same anarchic sense of speed and chaos as in some of the Wallace and Gromit films. The design work is also supremely detailed, especially in elements like the ornate mechanical centerpiece to the Boxtrolls’ lair, the assorted costumes of the upper-crust townspeople, or the extreme (and delightfully disgusting) reaction that Snatcher has to something in the movie that I’d rather leave as a surprise.

Unfortunately, the characters don’t seem to have quite the same attention to detail as the setting or the animation. Snatcher may be the most interesting character in the film, with grudges and motivations that extend a little past the usual black-hatted villain that even extend a shade of sympathy to him. We may also feel for Winnie, who can’t seem to do anything to attract her father’s affections and whose sense of pluck and vivid imagination make her quite appealing. If we feel for Eggs, it’s largely out of pity for his situation, where he doesn’t completely fit among either humans or Boxtrolls (although this figures into a late-movie plot twist in an interesting way). I’m also deeply impressed at how well Dee Bradley Baker‘s vocal performance as Fish is able to fully flesh out his relationship as a foster father for Eggs, even though he doesn’t have the benefit of words. In fact, for some reason it didn’t even dawn on me that there were people behind the Boxtrolls’ grunting vocalizations until the credits rolled and I spotted an array of voiceover veterans as the many Boxtrolls. It is a testament to the animators’ and the performers’ skill how quickly I stopped thinking of Boxtrolls as artificial animated creatures so fast that I forgot that there were performers behind them.

As with ParaNorman, I was surprisingly unimpressed with the movie’s 3-D effects. Considering that stop-motion is made with real objects, it would seem that it would benefit much more from 3-D filmmaking technology than any other form of animation. The 3-D effects in The Boxtrolls is good, and the technology seems to have advanced to the point where the glasses don’t make things too dark any more, but nothing about the 3-D really seemed to stick out in my mind in the end.

If I have a quibble with The Boxtrolls, it is a little bafflement at the intended target audience. Some characters like Lord Portley-Rind and the townspeople are played far too broadly to play well to older audiences. However, the darker elements of the movie are sure to frighten all but the most sturdy younger audience members. The movie is more successful in playing to all audiences in expressing its themes, with the younger crowd accepting the story at face value while older viewers can make out an interesting political parable about allowing fear to guide your actions. The sophistication in building up that theme and letting it play out within the story is remarkably mature, which is something that I thought the under-appreciated ParaNorman also did quite well. But if ParaNorman started with broad caricatures for its characters, they all ultimately became fodder for the movie’s overall theme of not judging things by their appearances, and thus explicitly undermine our initial impressions. It’s kind of the point that they look like caricatures initially. The Boxtrolls never quite gets its characters to that point; by the end of the movie, we see no more depth and are are no more sympathetic to major characters like Lord Portley-Rind, and even if we have some sympathy for Snatcher, he’s also still a bit too broad to have real depth and dimension to him.

On the flip side, I find The Boxtrolls‘ inability to be easily pigeonholed into a demographic category to also be a strength of the film. In an era when budgets are going up and creative risk-taking becomes ever rarer, it’s quite refreshing to see a studio pushing a movie that defies categories so assertively. Laika has always followed the beat of its own drummer, and in the end The Boxtrolls has ample rewards squirreled away in Cheesebridge and the Boxtroll caverns.

The Boxtrolls opens on September 26, 2014.