There is pleasure in the grotesque detail of Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable’s animation, but its young leads are underwritten. Worth considering for the craft, provided the peculiar creatures matter more than the adventure.
The Boxtrolls has enough invention in its creatures and surroundings to keep us looking, though rather less to make us excited about what happens next. Directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable embrace the macabre possibilities of a family animation, and the film benefits from their willingness to make things unattractive. The trouble is that the children at its centre are considerably less interesting than the company they keep. It is worth considering for anyone curious about stop-motion craft, with reservations about the story that gives all this work a reason to move.
Production designers Paul Lasaine, Michel Breton, August Hall and Tom McClure make the underground cavern a place worth exploring. We were delighted by its crowded detail, which made us want the action to pause so we could look around. There is pleasure in a family film that lets its creatures look peculiar instead of tidying them into something reassuring. The sheer density sometimes competes with the action, but there is usually something worth being distracted by.
John Ashlee Prat’s cinematography serves those designs well, keeping their odd shapes legible within an already busy picture. The stop-motion work makes these creatures feel solid enough to reach out and handle. Dario Marianelli’s score supplies energy, although musical encouragement cannot make the central adventure more involving. The images do most of the persuading, and they do it well enough to keep us watching through the thinner stretches.
Ben Kingsley gets more to work with as Snatcher than Isaac Hempstead Wright does as Eggs, and makes good use of the licence to be excessive. The villain is allowed a degree of unpleasantness that makes him worth watching even when the story falters. Nick Frost and Richard Ayoade also make Mr. Trout and Mr. Pickles enjoyable company, with a comic ease that the film could use more often. These performances supply much of its humour.
Eggs and Winnie Portley-Rind, voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright and Elle Fanning, ought to hold our attention without help from the surrounding grotesques. Neither performance is the problem. The screenplay by Adam Pava and Irena Brignull gives the young leads too little individuality, so their importance to the plot never quite becomes a reason to care about them. The social themes suffer from the same thinness: they are easy enough to recognise, but the film seems satisfied once we have recognised them.
Edie Ichioka’s editing keeps the adventure brisk, sometimes at the expense of a moment that might let us settle with a character. At 97 minutes, this is hardly an overlong film, yet its weaker passages still hurry us past people we barely know. Family adventures need not have complicated plots to work. They do need someone whose next decision matters to us, especially when the visual novelty begins to wear off.
There is enough affection in the handling of the Boxtrolls to make us wish they had more of the film to themselves. Its willingness to indulge a child’s interest in unpleasant things is also welcome, though younger viewers may find that less amusing than their elders. Try it if exploring the corners of an animated world is a substantial part of the pleasure.
