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Film Review: 'The Boxtrolls'

Mia Galuppo |
September 27, 2014 | 5:07 p.m. PDT

Staff Reporter

(Tumblr/@under-radar-mag)
(Tumblr/@under-radar-mag)
The Boxtrolls” is visually stunning. This fact, in and of itself, is enough reason to go see the movie. Hell, it is enough reason to shell out the extra $5 to see it with an extra dimension tacked on.

For those of you who did not have the stop-motion Lego movie-making kit during your most formative years: stop-motion is a type of animation that involves constructing a film frame-by-frame by incrementally moving puppets in order to simulate continuous motion.

Everything that is on screen is constructed: the houses, the mailboxes, the cracks in the sidewalk, the flowers growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk. Some art school graduate had to spend a few hours thinking about how to connect tiny, fake petals to a tiny, fake stem that would be in the movie for about three seconds. It is an arduous process that yields an incredibly unique result. 

READ MORE: Film Review: 'Boyhood'

Likely due to their organic nature, stop-motion lends itself well to the macabre, which explains why Tim “the proprietor of all your childhood nightmares” Burton is such a big fan. The movies are incredibly stylized, with tactile worlds that could often be described as creepy, often proving too scary for younger audiences. 

While watching "Boxtrolls" is easy to get lost in the production and character design, you will not find yourself getting lost in the narrative.

Based on the book “There Be Monsters”, the movie follows a boy named Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright a.k.a. Bran Stark) who is raised by the titular community of mischievous quadrilaterally-obsessed trolls that live under the fictitious town of Cheesebridge. When his adoptive family is threatened, Eggs teams up with Winnie (Elle Fanning a.k.a. lil’ Fanning a.k.a. Fanning 2.0 a.k.a. Fanning: The Reckoning) to save the trolls and convince the townspeople of their gentile nature.

Laika, the studio responsible for “Boxtrolls,” specializes in stop-motion animation, having previously produced to Oscar-nominated “Coraline” and “ParaNorman.” All movies carry a similar tone, with young protagonists that act as a bridge between two worlds. There is reality, filled with ignorant or ambivalent adult-figures, and there is its surrealist underbelly.

READ MORE: Film Review: 'X-Men: Days Of Future Past'

 “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” although billed as kid movies, both deal with complex, existential issues that carry more weight when you view them through a mature lense. It’s like if Kafka or Melville got ahold of modeling clay and a camera. In comparison to its predecessors, “Boxtrolls” is the most kid-friendly animation yet. It is a straight-forward us versus them narrative that lacks a lot of subtext. This is not necessarily a bad thing, being that the movie is meant for an underage viewership. 

As a similar case studying, also involving adolescent entertainment, we can look at the staying power of the serialized comics “Calvin & Hobbes” and “Marmaduke.” As you grow-up-- physically, mentaly and metaphorically-- Bill Watterson’s characters take on new meaning only adding to your admiration of the nuanced narrative, but when you are older you come to realize that Marmaduke is just a really big dog. “Boxtrolls,” in comparison to “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” will not age with its audience.

But, man, those cracks in the sidewalk are impeccable.

Reach Staff Reporter Mia Galuppo here.



 

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