Review: The Boxtrolls

Set in the town of Cheesebridge, ruled by the pompous aristocrat Lord Portley-Rind (voiced by Jared Harris), who sits around with his cronies being all snooty and sniffing cheeses, wearing their big white hats. Underground, though, live The Boxtrolls, so named because…they’re trolls who wear boxes. Yeah. Among them, though, lives a young boy (voiced by Isaac Hampstead Wright) who goes by the name Eggs…‘coz he wears a box that says ‘Eggs’ on it. Eggs doesn’t actually know he’s human…even though he looks nothing like a Boxtroll and speaks perfect English. Bright boy that one. Anyhoo, the dastardly Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Sir Ben Kingsley) covets a big white hat and sees exterminating all of the Boxtrolls (whom the community have blamed for ‘kidnapping’ Eggs) as his ticket to getting one. Yep, that really is a Holocaust surrogate you’re detecting. In a kids movie. Wow. Snatcher also wants to eat cheese…even though it does very strange and very disgusting things to his face. You really don’t want to know. No, I’m serious, don’t ask.

 

What an odd film to be marketing to children. I must admit this 2014 Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It’s stop-motion, it’s a very old-fashioned story about cheese-eating aristocratic villains, and while the film’s title characters might be gremlin-like creatures who wear boxes, they could just as well have been bloody Wombles. Hey, I liked the Wombles as a kid too, but that was about 30 years ago. They could’ve made a traditional cell-animation version of something like this back in the 60s and gotten Robert Morley and Sir Peter Ustinov to voice the aristocratic fops, and you’d probably have the inimitable Roy Kinnear in there somewhere too. That’d actually be better than what we get here. This isn’t old-fashioned and quaintly ‘English’, it’s completely outdated, I think (Not to mention bizarrely similar in story to “Nightbreed”. Am I the only one?). I’m not a child however, nor have I asked any kids whether they like the film or not. So I may very well be wrong here. What matters is whether I liked the film or not. You’d think that it being somewhat old-fashioned and a bit dark would appeal to me (I love me some Roald Dahl darkly comedic childrens’ stories), but I’m afraid I found the film mostly pretty boring and off-putting.

 

I also think the film was a bit scant on details, and certainly logic. How can a boy raised by a bunch of boxtrolls somehow speak and understand English? I know it’s a kids movie and all, but c’mon, that’s just stupid (He’s hilarious in the early scenes when he’s young, though. He’s like a nasty version of the adorable Boo from “Monsters, Inc.”) What the hell are Boxtrolls, anyway? We don’t much know anything about them, I’m afraid. They’re basically the British version of Gremlins, except not nearly as mean-spirited…or entertaining. It’s so lazily done, and the poor introduction into this scenario makes it very hard to get into the story in order to really care about any of it. By the time the details start slowly (and still rather scantly) coming in, I had already checked out, mentally and emotionally. I didn’t care about the story nor the characters, though at least the grotesque cheese-eaters amused me from time to time (and full credit to Sir Ben Kingsley for trying on a different voice/accent than you might expect from him).

 

Who was this aimed at? I can’t imagine the little ones would care about much of it beyond the funny little buggers wearing boxes, and the film gets way too preachy and message-oriented towards the end. So I’m afraid this one was a bit of a misfire, really and I felt both too young and too old to really enjoy it. The stop-motion animation is just OK for its kind (But it ain’t no “Frankenweenie”), though the cobble-stone streets and funny-shaped buildings were interesting, and it was all very shadowy which is nice. But I kept expecting to find out that it was merely an ad for boiled lollies or a box of chocolates or something. Archaic, off-putting, only occasionally funny, and poorly scripted. Sir Ben seems to be having a ball, though, and it’s not the worst film he’s been involved with. Every scene he’s in is entertaining, the rest…isn’t. At all. Based on an Alan Snow novel, the screenplay is by Irena Brignull & Adam Pava.

 

Rating: C