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Last summer, Portland animation house Laika turned heads with a trailer full of same-sex couples materializing and evaporating next to a rosy-cheeked toddler. "Sometimes, there's a mother," the narrator crooned. "Sometimes, there's a father. Sometimes, there's a father and a father. Sometimes, both fathers are mothers. Families come in all shapes and sizes."
The resulting feature film, The Boxtrolls, directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable, does away with any of these loving gay parents—actually, it does away with most loving humans, full stop. It also takes a surprisingly long time to get to this message about family, which gets muddled in a narrative that encompasses class envy, political corruption and (of course) how it's what's on the inside that counts. As in Laika's previous two efforts—the fantastical Coraline and playfully supernatural ParaNorman—The Boxtrolls boasts a scrupulously crafted world. But its overstuffed screenplay lacks humor, and it could use a great deal more fun.
The film's titular monsters are misunderstood insect-eating beasts with stubby teeth and blue-tinted skin—they look a little like Despicable Me's minions, just highly gnarled and dressed in cardboard boxes. Dumpster divers and DIY tinkerers, the boxtrolls come out at night to salvage discarded light bulbs and alarm clocks, which they take to their subterranean lair. And, for reasons not explained till relatively late in the film, they're raising a human child—Eggs, named after the box he wears. (As best I could tell, when it comes to gender and sexual identity, boxtrolls don't fit into any of our neat little, ahem, boxes.)
Above ground, the boxtrolls are seen as bloodthirsty child-gobblers, and evil social climber Archibald Snatcher (voiced by a growling Ben Kingsley) is committed to a campaign of boxtroll extermination. From there, the convoluted plot—loosely adapted from Alan Snow's fantasy adventure novel Here Be Monsters!—grows to include a plucky little girl, cheese-obsessed bigwigs who choose a giant wheel of brie over a children's hospital, and a drag queen who looks like a nightmarish collaboration between Tim Burton and John Waters. It's two of Snatcher's henchmen who provide the film's smartest material: Repeatedly and unwittingly caught in philosophical conversations, they question their definitions of heroism and villainy. For a kids' movie, it's a pretty sophisticated presentation of bad guys.
More often, though, the story tips from complexity into clutter. Bewilderingly, it gives the likable boxtrolls short shrift, aside from a charming opening sequence involving Eggs and his best bud, Fish. The town is called Cheesebridge, but instead of dairy puns, we get clunky platitudes: "Cheese, hats, boxes, they don't make you," Eggs says. "You make you.â
Visually, The Boxtrolls
is as textured as we've come to expect from Laika. Cheesebridge is a
Victorian-esque town of vertiginously steep cobblestone streets and
copper-colored roofs. Underground, the boxtrolls live in a steampunk
wonderland of twinkle lights and Rube Goldberg machines. Yet all this
3-D stop-motion wizardry is deadened by a stubbornly brownish color
scheme, which only breaks at certain points, as when Snatcher's face
swells to resemble a lumpy heirloom tomato (he's severely
lactose-intolerant, the poor thing). The dirty palette could be its own
form of subversion, a revolt against the candy-colored sheen of other
animated kids' movies. But in practice, it just further dulls what's
already a muddy tale.
Critic's Grade: C+
SEE IT: The Boxtrolls is rated PG. It opens Friday at most major Portland-area theaters.
WWeek 2015