The Boxtrolls

The Boxtrolls is something of a mixed bag, one of those films you're either going to love or be somewhat annoyed by. Coming from the same animation studio - Laika Entertainment - that did The Corpse Bride, Coraline and ParaNorman, your expectations should depend largely on whether or not you liked those films. As someone who loved Coraline, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I like The Boxtrolls quite a bit. Fans of the novel on which the film is based - Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow - should be advised that substantial changes in the story were made for the movie.The film opens in the visually stunning town of Cheesebridge, a pseudo-Victorian community that looks like the brainchild of a collaboration between Charles Dickens and Charles Addams with the occasional bit of steam-punk added in for good measure. The upper class of Cheesebridge are distinguished by their conspicuous white stove-pipe hats and their even more conspicuous consumption of all things cheese, things that the lower class can only look upon and aspire to. But there is also an underclass of Cheesebridge, one that lives literally under the town, a race of grotesque-looking and highly inventive but harmless beings called boxtrolls, so-named because of their nature of picking boxes left out by the humans to wear and live in much in the same way hermit crabs pick the shells of other sea creatures to live in. And like hermit crabs which, when startled, quickly disappear into their shells, boxtrolls just as quickly disappear into their boxes to avoid being seen by humans.The humans and the boxtrolls have a fairly quiet co-existence for the most part, the humans keeping to the surface and the boxtrolls staying below until nightfall when they come up and roam furtively about the streets, looking for cast-off things to use as parts for their mix-n-match creations. Until one night when a human toddler is supposedly abducted by boxtrolls, sending the humans into a fearful panic such that boxtrolls are no longer regarded as odd half-believed folk tales but as dangerous realities. In response to the outcry, the mayor of Cheesebridge, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) commissions social-climbing Archibald Snatcher (a deliciously over-the-top Ben Kingsley) to rid the town of boxtrolls by any means necessary, in return for which the desperately ambitious Snatcher will be granted his own white hat and entry into upper-class society. A rather questionable goal given that Snatcher has a highly unfortunate - and extremely nasty - food allergy that causes him to break out in distressingly gross ways at even the tiniest bite.But we quickly learn that the boy at the heart of the panic has actually been lovingly adopted by the boxtrolls and raised by them, who call him Eggs after the label on the box he is found in and gradually grows up in. Which in fact is how all of the boxtrolls get their names, like Fish (Dee Bradley Baker) and Shoe (Steve Blum), the two boxtrolls Eggs is closest to. Now living below the surface, Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) grows up thinking that he's a boxtroll, joining them as he gets older into their nightly forays into the world above. Forays that are growing ever more dangerous as the relentless Snatcher and his fearsome (if frequently incompetent) henchmen - Mr. Trout (Nick Frost), Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade) and Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan) - whittle down the boxtrolls' numbers with all manner of devious traps and devices.There's more than a bit of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book - the classic story of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves - at the heart of The Boxtrolls. Much of the fun comes from watching as Eggs grapples with the fact that he might not be a boxtroll, much to his distress, and from watching him try to fit in as a human, knowing absolutely nothing about human culture. Which all comes about when a girl named Winnie (Elle Fanning) inadvertently falls into the world below the town. Complicating matters further, she's the mayor's neglected daughter who's desperate in her own way for her father's attention. What ensues is Eggs coming to terms with who he is, and what he must become if he's to save his adopted community and the only family he knows.The voice talent behind the characters is excellent. Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark from Game of Thrones) is perfect as Eggs, giving him the right touches of curiosity, awkwardness and ultimately courage the situations call for. Ben Kingsley (Hugo, Gandhi) brings a gleefully scene-chewing level of over-the-top villainy to the story as Snatcher. A surprising and quite refreshing bit of comedy comes from Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead) and Richard Ayoade's (The IT Crowd) henchmen, Mr. Trout and Mr. Pickles, who engage in a running philosophical exchange on the nature of good and evil and their place in the grand scheme of things even as they dutifully carry out Snatcher's orders. Dee Bradley Baker (American Dad!) and Steve Blum (Digimon) and the actors voicing the other boxtrolls do a remarkable job of giving the creatures a distinctive psuedo-language that consists largely of hisses, gurgles and growls with the occasional semi-intelligible word popping up here and there. Simon Pegg (Star Trek, Shaun of the Dead) shows up in a nice turn (that I can't say anything about that wouldn't amount to being a spoiler).A particular delight though is Elle Fanning's (Maleficent) Winnie, who is most decidedly not your usual girl-in-distress and who quickly adopts a matter-of-fact take-charge approach to things, once she gets over her shock - and disappointment - at the boxtrolls turning out _not_ to be the ghastly, gore-dripping, bone-munching creatures she's heard so much about and wanted desperately to see. "Where are the rivers of blood and mountains of bones?" she demands at one point. "I was promised mountains of _bones_!"There are also a surprising number of well-known voice actors who show up in supporting roles, including Maurice LaMarche, James Urbaniak, Cree Summer and Laraine Newman among them. The music, which adds nicely to the feel of the film, was done by Dario Marianelli (Anna Karenina, V for Vendetta, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice). And on a side note, The Boxtrolls Song was written by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame.But an equal share of the credit has to go to the Laika stop-action animation team who the artists behind the imagined town of Cheesebridge and its various inhabitants. The level of detail is truly impressive, down to the littlest details like having the town crest - a knife and fork crossed over a wedge of cheese - cast on the town's manhole covers, something that might appear for only a second or two in the entire film. And even more impressive is how they bring the various characters' faces to life, giving each character a high degree of expressiveness that, coupled with the delivery of the voice actors, truly brings their personalities to life on the screen.If The Boxtrolls comes up short or uneven in some areas, the reasons can arguably be found in the creative team at the helm, which while having obvious talent and a reasonable background in animation and story-telling, are rather less than stellar when it comes to actually heading up a film. Anthony Stacchi's only previous experience as a director was as co-director on the so-so animated film Open Season (2006), while co-director Graham Annable's experience as a director was limited to some Bone and CSI video games (2005-2006). On the screen-writing end, Irena Brignull's only real experience was on the made-for-TV movie Skellig: The Owl Man (2009). Co-writer Adam Pava has the most to recommend him, having worked as a writer on several successful kids' TV shows like Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Out of Jimmy's Head and My Gym Partner's A Monkey, but this is his first attempt at doing screen-writing for a feature film. Having a surer, more experienced hand at the helm might've upped the overall quality a notch or two. But all that said, The Boxtrolls is still a lot of fun and impressive in its stop-action animation and the levels of detail involved.One other note: make sure you stay as the credits roll for a cute little extra scene with Trout and Pickles carrying on yet another existential exchange but with a bit of comic perspective added as the camera pulls back. It's definitely worth catching.Highly recommended if you love quirky, off-beat stories and affectionately grotesque animation and characters.

My two favorite Laika films are ParaNorman & Boxtrolls. & when I heard they were FINALLY releasing them on 4k… they were instant preorders!For Boxtrolls, the new 4k transfer is glorious. Absolutely it was worth the upgrade. There’s so much more texture & detail.

I bought the 1080p Blu-Ray as soon as it came out many years ago. I loved the vivid colors and the stop-motion photography. About four years ago, I finally got a theater-quality OLED and this movie stuck with me as one that I wish would be released in 4K. I pre-ordered the week it was available, and my family watched it last night. Well worth the wait, and well done to whoever made the decision to let us see the movie with the same detail in which it was made.For those who have never seen the movie, it is a great film for the family - to a younger child it is a good vs. evil story. To the adult, it is a well-crafted and layered allegory that seems to get more poignant over time.

This is my grandmother's and my favorite movie to watch together. No visit is complete without watching it two or three times, everytime she comes for a weekend visit.

Cute movie! We loved it:)

Steampunkalicious surprise: BOXTROLLS is fine art and marvelous acting, plus pretty damned important stuff our world needs to examine... masquerading as a kid's film!Kid-appropriate for all ages. No doubt that part of this film's appeal was carefully engineered for success. But it's the visuals that kept me watching, such perfectly realized and visually delightful worlds that I watched it twice. OK, and Ben Kingsley as the prime evil entrepreneur with his trio of exceptionally thoughtful henchmen, took this film fable beyond anything I've seen animated since Tim Burton's NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. But that is definitely more for an ado-adult audience.ALERT: You'll never look at the cheese plate at your next foodie party the same way. DO NOT PASS THE BRIE, PLEASE.Here's my shoutout to the great actors who voice the trolls, and the creators of the Box Troll dialect, who also deserve particular praise.We live in a world where it's now crucial that even young kids start learning how greed and social control can be used to target cultural differences, and how the short path from that deadly combo leads to the worst things human beings do to each other. We need this movie to show kids this truth early on, because it keeps happening, and kids keep getting bombed...or strapping on bombs because this short path is really profitable for those who exploit religious and ethnic differences. It happens over and over again.By the end of BOXTROLLS, I realized, largely through the hilarious villainy of Ben Kingsley's character, I'd also been shown in a non-preachy, incredibly funny way, just how privatization gone wild destroys local culture and local identity, until there's not much left for *the rest of us* to choose from, or call on for our protection. We see the ongoing inaction of *the rest of us* never fails to delivers all the power to...the wrongo guys.Without getting terribly gorey and never bogging down in puritanical preachiness [like those disgusting Veggie Tales], this movie shows how and what it takes to first, villainize the innocent, and then seamlessly roll out the machinery of, well, ethnic cleansing and holocaust.Two deeply detailed little worlds, the cheezy vintage Middle Europeanesque above, where holding on to what passes for bling and celebrity blinds everyone to what's really going on, and the hidden, night realm of the resourceful, intensely creative, Box Troll folk who repurpose rusting Victorian junk into useful machines and folkart.I hope families will make watching this film together an annual ritual --and after my 2nd viewing, I'm convinced BOXTROLLS would be an important, rich addition to middleschool curriculum, as a fun but deep prequel to ANIMAL FARM.

If you loved Coraline and Paranorman, you will probably like this. It tells the story of a group of box trolls (so-called because they hide and sleep in boxes) who live underneath a city called Cheesebridge. A boy called Eggs lives with the trolls, after they adopted him as a baby. He is so integrated that he is not even aware he is a human. He then befriends the daughter of the leader of Cheesebridge, and together they must convince the rest of the town that the box trolls aren't to be feared or persecuted.

A delightful film. I'd had seen Coraline, one of their other films, before and loved that. It's stop animation (like Wallace and Grommit) which gives it a charm that computer generated animation cannot, such as the subtle hand-crafted expression on the characters. The story line, as well as the characters, is very imaginative and I didn't see the ending coming, although in hindsight there were hints along the way. Lots of action, touching moments and jokes and would be great for older children, say 7+

Very good, very funny cartoon. A human boy has been brought up by boxtrolls who are ugly, but well meaning, little creatures that live underground and in the sewers and scavenge in the town at night. They wear cardboard bowxes for clothes. The boy eventually realises he is human and then tries to convince the other humans that the boxtrolls are not evil as is generally thought.The actors providing the voices do a wonderful job.Highly recommended

A very amusing and beautifully-executed stop-motion film (think Wallace & Grommit on steroids).Too good for children. Don't miss the additional animations in the credits.

Just received the box trolls dvd today,thanks for the speedy delivery,we love these box trolls they are so funny and so well made for animation,they are worth buying very enjoyable watching.regards Mrs jefcoate