Monday, October 6, 2014

THE BOXTROLLS


The Boxtrolls is a movie of such strong virtues that it’s tempting to overlook its shortcomings. Unfortunately, they are there, spoiling the wonder of classic dark fantasy (Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters! to be exact).
To be optimistic, there is more to admire than regret here. As always, LAIKA’s puppets become as real and move as fluidly as any cartoon, there is even a nifty philosophical gag about the craft for those who sit to the end of the credits (which are fun hand-drawn gags in themselves). Each character is a lively creation. Like Walt Disney first did for his seven dwarfs for Snow White, each of the playful trolls is a distinct invention, named after the type of box it uses for its shell. There’s Wheels, Oil Can, Shoe, and Fish (Dee Bradley Baker), who is a sort of father figure. To who?  Why to the human baby they took from the human world above and raised as their own in their secret cavern under the streets of the town.
They took in this “Trubshaw Baby” (as he became known after his kidnapping) as one of their one and named him after the egg carton he wears over his shirt for reasons the movie explains in due time, but it’s clear from the start that the world above is a nasty place to be. The elite ruler, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) reigns from a castle high above a mountain-tip overlooking the village. Both the ladder to and the aspiration of royalty in Cheesebridge is to be a good judge of cheese, a title distinguished by a coveted white top hat.
This is an even stronger throwback to Great Britain’s class system than 2005’s Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The baddies, a gang of boxtroll exterminators, are marked by their tattered red hats. They are a dirty mean bunch that aspires to bigger things. Though the movie makes the point that, “Cheese, boxes, hats, are not what make you. You make you,” the rest of Cheesebridge seems to scorn both the trolls and the exterminators, and that’s the irony. Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) and his men live in a stark factory much like the cavern of the creatures they chase.
Oh, but The Boxtrolls takes plenty of jabs at the upper-class as well. As Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) makes his way to the grand ball to warn the town of Snatcher’s evil plan, the movie takes every opportunity to treat the pompous society with ridicule and by the time he is humiliated and cast away from the castle Eggs vows never to be seen amongst the “real monsters” again. Indeed, Lord Portley-Rind cares more about his hat and cheeses than Winnie (Elle Fanning), his rebellious daughter, in contrast to the strong sense of family among the troll community and their adopted son.
There is a sort of rusty old charm to stop-motion animation that CGI, for all of its razzle-dazzle, can’t capture. Each character seems to exist of real matter and occupy real space as, indeed, a puppet does. No matter how grotesque (a troll, a grimy exterminator, etc.), each being or object here is crafted with such delicate care, they appeal to multiple senses. We can feel and therefore crave the cheese the judges hold, we can feel the sensory appeal of the prestigious hats when they are described as “white and fluffy” and feel the desire to hold one. Even the bugs that are fodder for the trolls look good enough to grab.
After animators in the United States abandoned it for other techniques, Great Britain took to stop-motion animation and did wonderful things with it, especially Cosgrove Hall’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. The charm never wore off in England and found a new cast in Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. Though an American production, The Boxtrolls is a healthy reminder of the primal beauty offered in The Wind in the Willows (Snatcher’s most wicked henchman, Mr. Gristle, even bares and unflattering resemblance to Mr. Toad while Mr. Pickles, his most eager to redeem, could not look more like Rat when sporting his fake whiskers).
The Boxtrolls brings back the old pleasantry of a vanishing art form and is the perfect way to bring a storybook to life. But the whimsy is cut short by hurried writing, which turns out to be a costlier mistake here than usual.
The first mistake of directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable was opening the film with the trolls’ presence already established in Cheesebridge, where they have become as a sight as pigeons and rats. It would have been nice to have witnessed the surprise and panic stirred by their arrival. What did the villagers think when these little green men started popping out from under the streets? Was there fear or amazement? How did the hostility first start? The film foregoes all of that and begins at a point when all the shock and awe has passed and the trolls may as well be everyday vermin. They are no longer so much feared, but loathed. Besides the mystery of what happened to the Trubshaw Baby, there is no longer any mystery about them and this over familiarity with the supernatural may be what disappointed Alonso Duralde who called it, “A charmless misfire.”
Duralde is not being quite fair. The Boxtrolls has a thumping heart and designer’s elegance, but for all its artistic flair and creative inventions, described accurately by LAIKA president Travis Knight as, “a visually dazzling mash-up of gripping detective story, absurdist comedy, and steampunk adventure with a surprisingly wholesome heart. It’s Dickens by way of Monty Python,” The Boxtrolls is surprisingly blasé about its own magic and fantasy. It’s surprising considering LAIKA’s fascination with secret worlds. Coraline, the studio’s best film, introduced a parallel world just a wall away from a mundane existence, with obvious signs that something terrible was hidden behind its pleasures. ParaNorman was considerably less meticulous in developing its chills, in part because the little boy of the title had the gift of seeing ghosts before the movie began, but it still managed to introduce the spirits in such a level that shocked us along with the child accustomed to seeing them. In The Boxtrolls, the little creatures are treated as just another part of the city. Wondrous as they may be in themselves, we need to see them strike awe in our fellow humans to be convinced of their power.

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