Prior to the Trolls Crawled Out: The Whispers of Curiosity
When The Boxtrolls was announced, the excitement was nothing like the overwhelmingly packed, ear-splitting excitement of the event like modern superhero films get. Instead, it was a low buzz, the kind that only LAIKA films get, the kind that cinephiles, the animation community, and critics get a glimpse of and begin to whisper about months in advance. After the films Coraline and ParaNorman, LAIKA had aquired the reputation and status of the company that could take the strangest and most odd premises and mold those insides into an emotionally gripping and rich story. Audiences had come to expect an LAIKA film to be a visual masterpiece, full of quirky cultural references, and a touch of oddness and discomfort just to round everything out.
This installment, however, had a very specific and ‘Different’ promise: a world inspired by the works of the author Charles Dickens, fully wrought with hand puppet, social satire, children’s adventure, and characters that would routinely go into a cardboard box, and make a home out of it, rather than go out to the outside world. During a time and era dominated by the giNts of CGI, this made a bold statement.
Nostalgia from Indian animation fans, especially those that had spend time poruing over handcrafted animation from Doordarshan, was great. The buzz only intensified with the announcement of the voice cast: Kingsley, Fanning, Hempstead Wright, and Pegg: a perfect ensemble of young and old of characters set to bring life to the world created.
Hope was high. Would this be LAIKA’s largest construct of world-building yet?
A Child of the Underground and the World above
Eggs, the human boy raised by boxtrolls, is at the story’s core. The boxtrolls, gentle, curious, mechanized creatures, scuttle below cheesebridge. Eggs is raised under the belief that he’s a boxtroll, communicating through a series of grunts and dressing like a box. He thinks of a loose gear or broken contraption as a toy.
Eggs is voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright, aka Bran Stark — the most iconic role of Wright’s career. Innocent, yet orchestrating this noble destiny, the character is a perfect balance, which matched Isaac’s story perfectly. Filming Game of Thrones, Isaac simultaneously had the exact story of public pressure, and a storyline of boyish vulnerability, and building courage together perfectly matched Eggs.
When the story of the film begins, a pest exterminator and the film’s antagonist, Archibald Snatcher, spreads the antagonization that the boxtrolls are children kidnapping monsters. Snatcher’s ambition is simple. He wishes to be a member of the elite class of Cheesebridge, the White Hats, and extermination — even to the point of genocide — he believes is the only means of achieving it.
A major highlight of the movie was the performance by Ben Kingsley as Snatcher. Kingsley has always excelled in the role of an obsessive character, and in 2014, but in 2014 he was able to transition between serious drama and quirky characters with ease. His performance in the movie the Boxtrolls demonstrated dark humor with great timing, which showcased great versatility for serious actors, as well as the appreciation for an unhinged role of improvisation. \n \nCharacters Moving Towards Their Inner Truth \nEgg\’s emotional arc is powerful and simple, which is the discovery of his own identity. This, however, must unlearn the idea that to belong one must be the same as everyone else. Within the context of Indian families, where identity is tied to the community, caste and/or tradition, Eggs\’s journey resonates. The idea of claiming one\’s own story, however strange people may consider it to be.
Winnie’s curiosity propels her journey. While Fanning depicted children when this was filmed, she was starting to articulate older roles. The tension created by her performance lies in the odd clash between independence and childlike innocence. Apart from her curiosity and bravery, she stands out because she refuses to accept the sanitized and romanticisms of history her father, and by extension, the society of Cheesebridge, feeds her. Winnie shows the younger generation refusing to accept the closing history books.
Wicker, Fish, Shoe, Oil Can – all of the title characters have their own, and the characters themselves, emotional arcs to parallel their journeys and to add texture and nuance to their roles. They represent a found family of sorts. Oil Can, Fish, and Shoe are gentle tinkerers and their emotional retreat into hiding out of fear, a mirror of the emotional and social circumstances of marginalized and demonized groups by those in power. The film uses thematic characters to comment on how convenient propaganda serves power, and how it radically alters a community’s belief systems.
Exaggerated Victorian England – a dusty parody of it, to be precise – serves as the direct inspiration for Cheesebridge’s design. Its architecture, social hierarchy, and fashion are designed to create a city that functions as a character in its own right. Class structure has a direct parallel to the social structure of England as it was on the height of its colonial empire: The White Hats were the aristocrats, the towns elite, and they stockpiled luxury cheese and treated it as a status symbol.
This world-building lets LAIKA mix satire with craft. LAIKA’s films offensive elite snobbery, political apathy, and social bias. Some critics even stated the satire had strayed too far into the absurd. That absurdity is the whole point. When taken at face value, hierarchical societies and their accompanying satire become increasingly absurd.
What Worked And What Didn’t
The Boxtrolls is a visually stunning movie. The attention to detail is phenomenal, a meticulous engraving and polishing of every gear, every smudge of coal, and every fold on a cardboard box, as if crafted with care. LAIKA blended their trademark practical puppetry and aided with digital animation and they created a masterpiece. The chase sequences stand as a bonafide testament to the continued marvels of stop motion animation. The animation of the highly mechanized collapsing tunnel and of all the moving machinery is a wonder.
More emotional scenes happen when the movie wants to breathe during moments of action. Eggs confronting Snatcher, Winnie standing up to her highly indifferent father, and, the boxtrolls voicing their fear of losing their lives all add to the emotional beauty of the film.
The pacing of the narrative is something that some viewers picked up on. Some found the body-horror gags to be a bit off, in contrast to some of the families who found the gags humorous. India’s parents, who greatly prefer kinder movies for their children, suggest that The Boxtrolls is more of a niche favorite rather than a mainstream success.
The heart of the film was there for all to see.The Actors Behind the Voices: Lives in Motion
2014 was a year of change for most of the cast. Isaac was moving on from his career as a child actor while Fanning was taking on more challenging roles. Pegg, who had a minor, but key, character, was trying to balance his place in Hollywood with indie films and Kingsley was still taking on more offbeat roles and characterizations. They were in the middle of career changes and crossroad moments in their careers, but that made the film all the more better as each actor was portraying a character that was on the verge of changing and transforming themselves.
Whispers From Behind the Camera
A few people are aware of the following trivia:
- Kingsley’s early studio debates with executives on the portrayal of Snatcher’s drag character as Madame Frou Frou Frivole were resolved in the character’s favor as Kingsley decided to lean in to full character.
- Animators had to hand paint cheese textures because the studio’s real cheese was melting from the heat of the studio lights.
- LAIKA built a giant puppet for Snatcher’s last transformation monster.
- A minor controversy of labour was built up around some of the over the crunch animators who were ignored during the promotion cycle.
As if the boxtrolls were narrating this story, LAIKA took raw, unfinished materials, cluttered, chaotic, and blended together, reconstructed artistry, and manufactured an essence of far away lands.