There’s always been something slightly unclean about LAIKA, a studio that specializes in children’s fantasy films animated with stop-motion puppets. Not in a rude or unseemly way, heavens no, they just don’t seem interested in producing streamlined four-quadrant family fare. Their first two movies, Coraline and ParaNorman, were dark and imaginative films that veered off in fascinating directions on the filmmakers’ whims. If it was interesting, they did it. If it was boring or old hat, they discarded it. Those two films are very special, largely because they made this slightly off-kilter approach to their stories work.
The Boxtrolls, unfortunately, doesn’t quite get away with it. If Coraline and ParaNorman feel as cluttered as Henry Darger’s fabled apartment, The Boxtrolls feels like a junk drawer in Terry Gilliam’s office. It’s full of bizarre creations, whimsical notions and strange half-cocked ideas, but they don’t quite come together as a single entity. The eccentricities pile up, and most of them are endearing, but a little more focus would have helped this movie stand on its own as an accomplishment, instead of just an amusement.
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The film stars Isaac Hempstead-Wright (“Game of Thrones”) as Eggs, an orphan adopted by funny little subterranean creatures called Boxtrolls, which wear only boxes and steal discarded knickknacks from the surface city of Cheesebridge. The humans of Cheesebridge are obsessed with class – the city leaders all wear white hats to show how aristocratic they are – and also with cheese, for some never-explained reason. Archibald Snatcher (Sir Ben Kingsley, doing a spot-on Michael Gambon impersonation) is a seedy pest exterminator who uses the disappearing boy as an excuse to exterminate the Boxtrolls once and for all, and earn his way into high society in the process.
It’s an okay plan, as kids movie villain plans go, but it takes forever to pull off. By the time Snatcher whittles down the Boxtroll population to just a handful of lovable imps, Eggs is at least ten years old and confident enough to venture into the outside world to rescue his family. Along the way he encounters Winifred (Elle Fanning), the daughter of Cheesebridge’s head honcho, and a spark plug heroine with a morbid fascination with the city’s resident demons. She’s actively disappointed that the Boxtrolls don’t try to murder her, and that they don’t live in a hellish city of human bones.
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Eggs and Snatcher come to blows and themes of nature vs. nurture arise like a behemoth, but by the time the plot finally kicks in The Boxtrolls has clearly lost its way. This film that relies so heavily on outsider mentality begins to sink into conventional story structures and super villain tropes, and the mix comes out lumpy. The eccentricities we came for feel like digressions from a straightforward story, and the straightforward story never quite functions like a real movie because it gets distracted with weird cheese pustules and mixed messages about cross-dressing.
The Boxtrolls is too intriguing to be bad, but too addled to be properly good. Audiences who appreciate awful puns and children portrayed as inspiring little weirdos (in the best way) will find a lot to like in Anthony Stacchi’s and Graham Annable’s wonky fable. Audiences looking for a film that feels tidy and whole may go home wanting. The box is clearly full, but whether you find its contents amusing or frustrating depends on whether you think one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, or if one man’s treasure is just another man’s junk.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
