The Boxtrolls is a
marvelous stop-motion family film with all the twisted macabre charms of a
Roald Dahl book or an Edward Gorey drawing. It conjures a wondrously imagined
storybook Edwardian village of crooked cobblestone streets and leaning
buildings clustered up one side of a skinny seaside hill and down the other.
Deep below the town’s sewers live squat grey-green trolls clad in cardboard
boxes. They’re harmless, kind-hearted beings who only come out at night,
scavenging for bits and bobs they cobble together into steampunk creations that
form their cavernous lair. But the humans fear them, leading to a storyline
about the boxtrolls’ persecution. So, yes, this is a movie about learning to
accept yourself and understand others. That’s like any number of family films.
But this one has dastardly shifty villains, adults who cruelly marginalize
children, and a society that willfully and mindlessly oppresses. You know, for kids!
Like the best kids’ films, it’s smart and involving on a
level that can be appreciated by any audience. This one is tremendously
imagined, creepy and cute in equal measure. The sophisticated, funny, and
deeply felt script by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, from a book by Alan Snow,
moves briskly, cleverly deploying its moralizing in a parade of grotesqueries.
The villain is an ugly, greedy man with spindly legs and a pendulous belly. His
name is Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and he leads the town’s crusade to
eradicate the boxtrolls. He spreads propaganda accusing the trolls of eating
children and leads his team of exterminators (Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, and
Tracy Morgan) out every night to capture the creatures. It’s all in hopes of
being promoted into the town’s elite White Hat club.
It is not all twisted. Our hero is a boy (Isaac Hempstead
Wright), apparently orphaned before the film starts, and raised by the
boxtrolls as one of their own. He alone understands their adorable guttural
babble, but he’s picked up human English as well. He thinks he’s a troll, but
soon learns he’s a bridge between the town’s worlds. The boxtrolls fear the
humans, who are controlled by leaders obsessed with hats and cheeses. They’re
more than happy to delegate troll suppression to a creepy striver like
Snatcher, the better to give them more time to devote to cheese. The mayor (Jared
Harris) barely acknowledges his daughter (Elle Fanning), allowing her to sneak
off and explore the world of the trolls. Both locales, above and below, are
filled up with charming details and throwaway gags. You get the sense man and
boxtroll would get along fine if only they could get over fears and prejudices.
A charmingly cracked story, the film features bouncy
slapstick, clattering gadgetry, and a compassionately lumpy design.
Painstakingly detailed in the way only stop-motion animation can be, the
characters move like gangly puppets and interact with the world in a tangible
way. Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi oversee enveloping 3D
environments that enliven terrifically staged dollhouse sets. It feels both
real and not in the same instant, in the way all stories do when you’re young.
There’s childlike wonder in these frames. Movements carry a weight and
presence, even as the events zip off confidently down whimsical alleys.
It's beautifully ugly, eccentric in every detail. This is a movie that features a man monstrously allergic to
cheese who gobbles it down anyway, his face and limbs swelling with flabby pustules
as it breaks out in bulging hives. (He’s cured by being covered in a writhing
mass of leeches.) Henchmen have discussions about whether they’re “the good
guys.” A little girl has a sense of morbid curiosity her father finds
distasteful. The town is enamored of a secretive French warbler coming to
town, one Madame Frou Frou. And then there are the trolls, who tinker, dance,
and waddle around, then fold back into their boxes every night, stacking
themselves gently into one big family cube. They mean well, and we want to see
them coexist peacefully.
This is the third film from Laika, an Oregon-based
stop-motion production company. The
Boxtrolls fits in nicely with Coraline
and ParaNorman in style and tone,
forming a lovely set of richly imagined and fantastically clever movies to
delight and thrill children of all ages. I think we can safely say they’ve
become as dependable and singular an animation studio as Ghibli or Pixar. We
know what to expect from them visually and emotionally – something skillfully
dark and sweet. These are films with personality and feeling. When so much of
Hollywood’s animated product is programmatic and conventional CGI homogeny,
there’s definitely room for creative people willing to make earnest stories
with sharp statements and distinctive imagery. How wonderful to have Laika. We
can trust their heart and intelligence and retain the capacity to be surprised
and charmed by their generously overflowing delights.
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