Boxtrolls review

                “Boxtrolls,” the most recent film by Laika Films (creators of “Coraline,” “9,” and “ParaNorman”) is a wonderfully detailed political parable, keeping the faith in painstaking stop-motion animation and model-work. It’s an ambitious effort both in practical execution and narrative scope, as it tries to connect many different levels of satire, storytelling and complicated subtext. However, while never failing to keep you dazzled visually, it loses some connection with the audience as it moves around quickly to keep all its plates spinning in the air.

                The story seems to take place in an alternate turn of the century Britain, where the currency is cheese and the economic classes are denoted by the colors of each individual’s hat—the poor wear red top hats, while the rich wear white. The ruler of the town of Cheesebridge, Lord Portley-Rind (Jarred Harris), is out of touch with the working class, concerned only for his cheese fortune, leaving his daughter Winnie (Elle Fanning) emotionally uncared for as well.  Unbeknownst to him, a treacherous worker named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsly) plans to leverage his way up to the white-hat level by faking the disappearance of an inventor’s child, throwing him to the mysterious under-dwellers of the city known as the Boxtrolls. They’re peaceful enough, only wanting to take human trash to build neat-looking, gear-oriented devices out of it, but in order for Snatcher to lead a culture war, he needs a social boogieman to keep the town’s people afraid. He then makes a deal with the village leadership to capture and destroy all of the monstrous Boxtrolls, in exchange for his promotion. Twelve years later, the human boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), affectionately renamed Eggs, has been raised to live as a Boxtroll, where he occasionally takes trips to the surface to steal garbage for the survival. After Snatcher arrests a member of his adopted family, with the help of the Lord’s precocious daughter, he ventures above-ground to uncover the grand conspiracy. 

                There’s a lot to admire in the details of this complicated world-building. The design of every individual character, as well as the city and environments they inhabit, is meticulously conceived; not only because of the difficult nature of stop-motion animation, but in the graphic consideration of every shot and every prop and every piece of clothing and how it all culminates to occupy every frame of the motion picture.  With its dynamic camera set-ups, moody lighting and fluid action set-pieces, this film constantly reminds you how far this art form has come since the days of Gumby. Technically speaking, Laika is miles ahead of their competition, providing a warm humanity and tactility that modern CGI animation just can’t replicate. 

                Unfortunately, the story isn’t as methodically executed. Though things move along fine enough and the allegories concerning class warfare, political deception, and the ‘othering’ of stigmatized minorities are dealt with in intelligent and entertaining ways, the emotional component lacks, largely because Eggs, our hero, is undefined and underwritten. He’s a boy raised as a monster and learns halfway through the film that he was adopted by a different species, and that’s a lot for any character to go through in 90 minutes, but in this film revelations are treated only as motivators to make him pass from one set piece to another. He’s too vague to root for, and though his partnership with the slightly more entertaining Winnie character is occasionally heartfelt, his role is primarily only fulfilling as the audience’s cypher through this world. Lucky for us, this world is pretty damn neat to look at—filled with creatures, drag-queens, and steam-punk, humanoid mech-tanks—and though the subtext should never drive the story, at least it keeps things interesting, even if we feel a little distant from (and occasionally bored with) our protagonist’s personal journey.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014