With just two features under its belt—Coraline and ParaNorman—stop-motion animation studio Laika has not only reinvigorated a retro filmmaking technique, but established a bold new trajectory for kid-friendly cinema. Laika’s works are at once grotesque and spellbinding, the patchwork haunted house to Pixar’s squeaky-clean theme park. Happily, the junior studio’s third feature film, The Boxtrolls, generally lives up to its antecedents in terms of visual splendor, ghoulish wit, and thematic sophistication.
The story unfolds in the pseudo-Edwardian city of Cheesebridge, where the citizens are obsessed with fromage and the sewers are infested with the eponymous boxtrolls. Cheesebridge’s populace views these peculiar creatures as thieving cannibals, but in truth the boxtrolls are benign nocturnal scavengers, dressed in (and named for) discarded cardboard boxes. A dim but gentle boxtroll named Fish has adopted a human child dubbed Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright), who grows into a preteen without suspecting his true heritage. Things get nasty for Eggs and his subterranean family when the cruel, ambitious Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) unleashes his endgame to eradicate all boxtrolls and win the coveted white hat of a city elder.
Beneath the film’s riotous surface lurks a straightforward and cartoonish action-thriller, one that’s neither as structurally elegant as Coraline nor as emotionally potent as ParaNorman. Yet like those films, The Boxtrolls tackles a plethora of complex subjects: integrity, propaganda, identity, self-delusion, and class mobility, to name a few. The clueless self-absorption of the one percent receives sharp criticism, but the story is mainly characterized by moral grays and difficult choices. In short, Laika’s latest film completes a hat trick of enthralling and stimulating cinema for all ages.
The Boxtrolls opens Friday, September 26 in wide release.
