Laika Studios proudly keeps stop motion animation charming and inventive in the CGI world of animation today. Coraline and Paranorman are thoughtful and clever stories that are a little weird but filled with heart: it’s easy for more parents to get behind them. The Box Trolls is a harder sell. The weirdness is still present, but with a paper thin story supporting it, The Box Trolls wastes some cool designs and the talented animators. Cheese should never factor into a story this much.
The events that set of The Boxtrolls involve Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) informing the cheese-eating white hats and their leader, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), that creatures known as boxtrolls captured and “killed” a small child, bringing him to their underground lair. Soon, these creatures would go after more kids in the town and especially important: after their cheeses. Snatcher suggest that he capture and kill all the boxtrolls in exchange to be a part of the white hats. Over 10 years, the boxtrolls numbers decrease, but the boy they kidnapped grows up known as Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright), given that name by the box he wears on his chest. After Fish (Dee Bradley Baker), the boxtroll who raised Eggs, gets kidnapped, Eggs goes topside to find him, eventually receiving help from Winnie (Elle Fanning) who happens to be Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter.
Animation in the Boxtrolls is a mixed bag. The boxtroll home is quite enjoyably designed, using moving cogs and the joy of creation to give the home a unique spin. The boxtroll creature is sort of clever, but outside of Fish or Shoe, no other boxtrolls get a developed personality. The nighttime city is the right mix of scary and mysterious, but the people in the city share a similar sameness compared to the boxtrolls. Anytime the animation focuses on gadgets and creativity, the specificity of the creation takes over and livens up the imagery. Perhaps that is what the writers were going for, but the movie as is doesn’t do enough to focus on that part of the story and chooses to focus on the underdeveloped kidnapping.
The story in The Boxtrolls is a frustrating study of suggestion and abandonment. Early in the film, there is an adorable scene of Fish being a surrogate father to Eggs, humoring him and giving him a present. This setup gives heft to Fish’s capture, and raises the stakes of Eggs’s quest to get him back. Then the movie turns into how Eggs ended up with the boxtrolls: a dark story for a kids film. This turn abandons the Eggs/Fish relationship, which was the movie’s strongpoint. Themes of ignorance, class structure, and surrogate families drift in and out of the screenplay, but the story thinks the kids will find it funny that a guy will kill things to be part of a cheese tasting. As funny as food allergies can be, the interesting information never becomes the main story to The Boxtroll’s detriment.
Voice acting is serviceable in the movie. Isaac Wright and Elle Fanning walk the kinda cute/kinda weird line (he is better than she) that Laika leads possess. Ben Kingsley can function as a Michael Gambon (Dumbledore from Harry Potter) voice replacement as the malevolent Snatcher. Kingsley does his best to give depth to a poorly written character. Nick Frost and Richard Ayodae get the best lines as existential henchmen of Snatchers that question their heroism. The boxtroll noisemakers don’t quite achieve minion levels of success, but they do sell the earnestness of the creatures.
The Boxtrolls is probably only for your slightly older odd cousin who is really into Tim Burton movies. Mediocre animation covering a lazy story exposes the smelly Swiss cheese size holes in the movie that lead to boring passages. The movie probably needed more left field puns like an amusing take cow byproducts. Come on, give shoe a friend named Lace: it’s so easy.