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The Boxtrolls is something of a mixed bag, one of those films you're either going to love or be somewhat annoyed by. Coming from the same animation studio - Laika Entertainment - that did The Corpse Bride, Coraline and ParaNorman, your expectations should depend largely on whether or not you liked those films. As someone who loved Coraline, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I like The Boxtrolls quite a bit. Fans of the novel on which the film is based - Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow - should be advised that substantial changes in the story were made for the movie.
The film opens in the visually stunning town of Cheesebridge, a pseudo-Victorian community that looks like the brainchild of a collaboration between Charles Dickens and Charles Addams with the occasional bit of steam-punk added in for good measure. The upper class of Cheesebridge are distinguished by their conspicuous white stove-pipe hats and their even more conspicuous consumption of all things cheese, things that the lower class can only look upon and aspire to. But there is also an underclass of Cheesebridge, one that lives literally under the town, a race of grotesque-looking and highly inventive but harmless beings called boxtrolls, so-named because of their nature of picking boxes left out by the humans to wear and live in much in the same way hermit crabs pick the shells of other sea creatures to live in. And like hermit crabs which, when startled, quickly disappear into their shells, boxtrolls just as quickly disappear into their boxes to avoid being seen by humans.
The humans and the boxtrolls have a fairly quiet co-existence for the most part, the humans keeping to the surface and the boxtrolls staying below until nightfall when they come up and roam furtively about the streets, looking for cast-off things to use as parts for their mix-n-match creations. Until one night when a human toddler is supposedly abducted by boxtrolls, sending the humans into a fearful panic such that boxtrolls are no longer regarded as odd half-believed folk tales but as dangerous realities. In response to the outcry, the mayor of Cheesebridge, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) commissions social-climbing Archibald Snatcher (a deliciously over-the-top Ben Kingsley) to rid the town of boxtrolls by any means necessary, in return for which the desperately ambitious Snatcher will be granted his own white hat and entry into upper-class society. A rather questionable goal given that Snatcher has a highly unfortunate - and extremely nasty - food allergy that causes him to break out in distressingly gross ways at even the tiniest bite.
But we quickly learn that the boy at the heart of the panic has actually been lovingly adopted by the boxtrolls and raised by them, who call him Eggs after the label on the box he is found in and gradually grows up in. Which in fact is how all of the boxtrolls get their names, like Fish (Dee Bradley Baker) and Shoe (Steve Blum), the two boxtrolls Eggs is closest to. Now living below the surface, Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) grows up thinking that he's a boxtroll, joining them as he gets older into their nightly forays into the world above. Forays that are growing ever more dangerous as the relentless Snatcher and his fearsome (if frequently incompetent) henchmen - Mr. Trout (Nick Frost), Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade) and Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan) - whittle down the boxtrolls' numbers with all manner of devious traps and devices.
There's more than a bit of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book - the classic story of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves - at the heart of The Boxtrolls. Much of the fun comes from watching as Eggs grapples with the fact that he might not be a boxtroll, much to his distress, and from watching him try to fit in as a human, knowing absolutely nothing about human culture. Which all comes about when a girl named Winnie (Elle Fanning) inadvertently falls into the world below the town. Complicating matters further, she's the mayor's neglected daughter who's desperate in her own way for her father's attention. What ensues is Eggs coming to terms with who he is, and what he must become if he's to save his adopted community and the only family he knows.
The voice talent behind the characters is excellent. Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark from Game of Thrones) is perfect as Eggs, giving him the right touches of curiosity, awkwardness and ultimately courage the situations call for. Ben Kingsley (Hugo, Gandhi) brings a gleefully scene-chewing level of over-the-top villainy to the story as Snatcher. A surprising and quite refreshing bit of comedy comes from Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead) and Richard Ayoade's (The IT Crowd) henchmen, Mr. Trout and Mr. Pickles, who engage in a running philosophical exchange on the nature of good and evil and their place in the grand scheme of things even as they dutifully carry out Snatcher's orders. Dee Bradley Baker (American Dad!) and Steve Blum (Digimon) and the actors voicing the other boxtrolls do a remarkable job of giving the creatures a distinctive psuedo-language that consists largely of hisses, gurgles and growls with the occasional semi-intelligible word popping up here and there. Simon Pegg (Star Trek, Shaun of the Dead) shows up in a nice turn (that I can't say anything about that wouldn't amount to being a spoiler).
A particular delight though is Elle Fanning's (Maleficent) Winnie, who is most decidedly not your usual girl-in-distress and who quickly adopts a matter-of-fact take-charge approach to things, once she gets over her shock - and disappointment - at the boxtrolls turning out _not_ to be the ghastly, gore-dripping, bone-munching creatures she's heard so much about and wanted desperately to see. "Where are the rivers of blood and mountains of bones?" she demands at one point. "I was promised mountains of _bones_!"
There are also a surprising number of well-known voice actors who show up in supporting roles, including Maurice LaMarche, James Urbaniak, Cree Summer and Laraine Newman among them. The music, which adds nicely to the feel of the film, was done by Dario Marianelli (Anna Karenina, V for Vendetta, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice). And on a side note, The Boxtrolls Song was written by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame.
But an equal share of the credit has to go to the Laika stop-action animation team who the artists behind the imagined town of Cheesebridge and its various inhabitants. The level of detail is truly impressive, down to the littlest details like having the town crest - a knife and fork crossed over a wedge of cheese - cast on the town's manhole covers, something that might appear for only a second or two in the entire film. And even more impressive is how they bring the various characters' faces to life, giving each character a high degree of expressiveness that, coupled with the delivery of the voice actors, truly brings their personalities to life on the screen.
If The Boxtrolls comes up short or uneven in some areas, the reasons can arguably be found in the creative team at the helm, which while having obvious talent and a reasonable background in animation and story-telling, are rather less than stellar when it comes to actually heading up a film. Anthony Stacchi's only previous experience as a director was as co-director on the so-so animated film Open Season (2006), while co-director Graham Annable's experience as a director was limited to some Bone and CSI video games (2005-2006). On the screen-writing end, Irena Brignull's only real experience was on the made-for-TV movie Skellig: The Owl Man (2009). Co-writer Adam Pava has the most to recommend him, having worked as a writer on several successful kids' TV shows like Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Out of Jimmy's Head and My Gym Partner's A Monkey, but this is his first attempt at doing screen-writing for a feature film. Having a surer, more experienced hand at the helm might've upped the overall quality a notch or two. But all that said, The Boxtrolls is still a lot of fun and impressive in its stop-action animation and the levels of detail involved.
One other note: make sure you stay as the credits roll for a cute little extra scene with Trout and Pickles carrying on yet another existential exchange but with a bit of comic perspective added as the camera pulls back. It's definitely worth catching.
Highly recommended if you love quirky, off-beat stories and affectionately grotesque animation and characters.
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