The Boxtrolls

The 2014 stop-motion animated film, The Boxtrolls, may be the least talked-about film by popular animation studio, Laika. While they’ve never been a studio that brought in large numbers or turned a giant profit, they certainly impacted people through their entrancing and captivatingly unique features like Coraline and ParaNorman, and their popularity was steadily growing when it was announced they would be making a film adaptation of the 2008 novel, Here Be Monsters! written and illustrated by Alan Snow, and at the start, it seemed to fare as well as the past two examples. It failed to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature despite being nominated and didn’t perform well at the box office by only earning back $108 million against a $60 million budget, but while the critical and audience reactions were  good, it wasn’t on the same level as the company’s previous two films, and with no one coming to back it up during its time of need, it’s safe to say it didn’t strike as strong a chord.

Set in the town of Cheesebridge, the residents are forced into curfew every night to protect themselves from Boxtrolls, subterranean creatures who live in the sewers and stalk the streets at night. This curfew was started by pest exterminator, Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), who reported that a Boxtroll was responsible for kidnapping a baby and killing his father, giving him the perfect opportunity to convince the city’s leader, Lord Portley-Rind (voiced by Jarred Harris) to bestow him the power to eliminate every Boxtroll in exchange for membership in the city’s cheese-loving council, the White Hats. After capturing most of the Boxtrolls, it is revealed to Portley-Rind’s spirited daughter, Winnifred (voiced by Elle Fanning), that the baby in question wasn’t eaten, but rather adopted by the Boxtrolls, growing into a young boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) who is unaware of his true heritage. Wanting to save his captured family, Eggs convinces Winifred to work with him to try and prove to her father that Boxtrolls aren’t evil, but Snatcher catches on to Eggs’ true parentage and refuses to let anything stop him from donning a white hat.

The Boxtrolls doesn’t have the same kind of magic or engagement that Coraline or ParaNorman had, nor does it produce the strongest final draft, but through a likeable cast of characters, inviting visuals and the wonderfully surreal and engaging tone synonymous with Laika, the film still manages to be an entertaining sit that won’t easily be forgotten.

Originally supposed to feature all five monsters present in the original book, Laika’s CEO and producer on the film, Travis Knight, felt that the script seemed a tad bit hollow and convinced the creatives to focus solely on the Boxtrolls, as he saw something compelling in these creatures and how they operated, and it’s easy to see where he’s coming from. While the movie doesn’t necessarily portray them very interestingly as they just feel like generic misunderstood voiceless creatures you’d commonly see in other children’s stories, the image of these creatures sporting boxes for clothing is a memorable image, and how they incorporate the boxes into their movement and manner of self-expression is enticing from a visual standpoint (especially for a company like Laika who thrive on abnormality and showcasing the unfamiliar in an animated format). While it was pretty tricky to condense a 550-page novel into a 90 min feature (especially since said book contains a surprisingly dense plot with multiple characters and an onslaught of commentary), it feels like the film’s screenwriters, Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, did a pretty good job shrinking it down while still retaining its quirkier, off-beat personality.

Laika are usually pretty good at creating family-friendly entertainment that house a uniquely dark personality akin to something from the 70s or 80s, but even though this film was also distributed by Focus Features (who Laika previously collaborated with to create Coraline), it decides to focus more on surreal humor and British wit rather than scares, which makes it feel drastically different from the company’s past to films which leaned heavily into creepy territories. Even though this might seem a little off, this new tone is quite welcomed, allowing what is essentially a very standard story of a misrepresented group fighting an authoritative institute to have a bit more flavor and provide plenty of strange scenarios that usually leads to some entertaining segments. The plot is fairly predictable and due to the fast pace, there’s no time to process moments that should be huge reveals, but the directing from Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable is decently spirited and keeps the story concise and emotionally engaging, the script may not be laugh out loud funny, but is pretty charming and certainly odd in parts, the characters are mostly pretty memorable and are voiced by colorful actors, and the world they created is so strange and distinctly British that audiences will want to know more about it.

Given the cliched narrative, it’d be safe to assume that the characters should also be cliched, and to some extent they are. We’ve seen plenty of stories about a boy being born of two worlds, a girl who desires to connect with her dismissive father, a group that hides away due to fear of the outside world, a bad guy who is willing to hurt and kills other to get what he wants, a political figure too obsessed with his own interest to notice those around him, etc, but since the movie has a very specific sense of humor and atmosphere, it allows these characters to be a little more interesting, even if their purpose in the story isn’t drastically upgraded. The supporting cast especially benefits from this, taking pretty basic roles and improving them with memorable dialogue, fun designs, and very talented voice actors. The cast overall is packed with iconic talent who know how to be funny and dramatic when it’s required, and while not all of them are used to their fullest (the film strangely wastes Simon Pegg and Toni Collette), most are used accordingly.

Winifred is a pretty great character, being a sheltered rich girl who gets a little too into graphic and disturbing myths surrounding the Boxtrolls as a means of crying out for attention, which is nicely brought to life by Elle Fanning. Ben Kingsley is also very strong as Snatcher, with his slimy delivery doing great at being both funny and intimidating, his overly animated and greasy design that is hiding an even more grotesque appearance underneath his already suspicious look, and his bizarre obsession with cheese in spite of being allergic to it results in a few fun gags. Jarred Harris is decent as the town leader, but really only feels like a one-joke character, most of the Boxtrolls are pretty perfunctory outside of the two main ones; Fish and Shoe (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum) but even they don’t have much to work with, and while Nick Frost and Richard Ayoade play the generic lanky/obese criminal henchmen archetype, their dialogue and delivery is entertaining enough to not be annoying. Ironically, one of the only characters to be generically written is the lead, with Eggs being a very standard fish-out-of-water character without much new added. Isaac Hempstead Wright voices him very well and he isn’t unlikeable in any sense, he’s just played as very safe and boring, which stands out in a world full of weirdo.

This movie looks quite different to past Laika films, which injected a lot of vibrant and even spookier colors that matched the mood of their chosen story. By comparison, this movie features a lot of yellows and browns, which you’d imagine would get dull to look at after a while, but not only is this set wonderfully constructed, with the setting being a town situated on top of a jagged mountain that gives off the image of a piercing tooth (which feels right out of a quirky children’s book), but the fluidity of the models, movement and pacing of the camera work, and the colorful way these characters are designed, helps make this color palette feel more atmospheric and appropriate. The movie has a Wallace & Gromit or Monty Python’s Flying Circus personality to it, as their stories feature strange circumstances that are abnormal but feel run more by the absurdity of its people and its world rather than a dramatic narrative or conflict.

This film definitely still has its larger-than-life qualities like a giant robot in the climax, but its surrounding elements are really what breathe life into this idea and makes it a lot more enjoyable than it arguably could’ve been otherwise. The stop motion animation as usual is very well done, has a tone of personality placed into the character models as well as the surrounding environment, and the fluidity of the movement looks even better than it did in their past films, it really shows an evolution of their craft (Coraline and ParaNorman never looked jittery and definitely pushed the boundaries in terms of fluid motion in stop-motion, but it feels extra smooth here). This is a very British film from almost every angle, and it doesn’t just come through the very prominent British talent that are involved in the voice work, but the dialect, sense of humor and even visual style in the stop-motion really feels like it has a strong British leaning that greatly matches the tone of the source material and results in a very well-balanced tone (even the song sung during the credits by Eric Idle doesn’t feel like your typical song to close a kids film on, it wanted to be something different).

The Boxtrolls may look like a silly kid’s film not associated with a film studio known for producing movies that specializes in traumatizing youths, but when you take a look back and see what the films have in common rather than what makes them different, you’ll see why, in spite of some obvious issues, it still comes out pretty strong. Laika seems to know how to make an entertaining film that’s familiar and enjoyably quick-to-understand yet still unique, fresh and wonderfully different from other children’s media, and The Boxtrolls is no exception. The lead is a little underwritten, the film doesn’t really have a lot to say (and when it does, it comes a little too late), and some of the voice actors are wasted (Tracy Morgan doesn’t even feel like he was required), but after an onslaught of films that try and hammer in the same message over and over again, it’s nice to see a film more interested in entertaining you rather than educating you, and this film pulls that off pretty well. May look a little ugly on the outside but is a lot more warm and friendly upon a closer inspection.