8 / 10
Official trailer
The Boxtrolls is Laika’s third feature and a strange, beautiful, sometimes overstuffed adventure that doesn’t get the credit it deserves.
Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable co-directed. The script is loosely adapted from Alan Snow’s novel Here Be Monsters. Isaac Hempstead Wright voiced Eggs, a human boy raised by the underground creatures known as Boxtrolls who wear cardboard boxes the way crabs wear shells. Ben Kingsley voiced Archibald Snatcher, the exterminator obsessed with achieving social standing by eliminating the Boxtrolls. Elle Fanning voiced Winnie. Jared Harris voiced Lord Portley-Rind.
Richard Ayoade, Tracy Morgan, and Nick Frost voiced the rest of Snatcher’s gang. Toni Collette voiced Lady Portley-Rind. The cast is dense.
Few animated films charm me the way this one does. The Boxtrolls themselves, shuffling around in their labeled boxes, are about as lovable as stop-motion creatures get, and Kingsley’s Snatcher is a villain I could watch all day. The script stuffs in more plot than it can carry, and that’s what keeps it at an 8.
Laika is the American stop-motion studio responsible for Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), this film, Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), and Missing Link (2019). Each of their productions is technically ambitious and at least one or two beats short of being a masterpiece. The Boxtrolls is the second-best of their first three features. ParaNorman is the best. Coraline is the most influential. The Boxtrolls is the least seen.
The Visual World
The film’s setting is the imaginary town of Cheesebridge, where residents measure social standing by the consumption of cheese. The town is built on stop-motion sets that combine Victorian architecture with a heightened, slightly Tim Burton-adjacent aesthetic. The cheese-tasting scenes are some of the most elaborate practical food animation ever produced.
The Boxtroll designs are the film’s strongest creative achievement.
The creatures wear cardboard boxes labeled with whatever was inside the box originally, which the audience picks up as a naming convention. Eggs is the boy raised by Boxtrolls and called Eggs because that was what was in his original box. The visual identification of each Boxtroll by his box label is the kind of design choice that holds up across the runtime.
The box labels are the best joke in the film. Once you learn the rule, every new Boxtroll is a little punchline waiting to be read, and naming the boy Eggs is the sweetest gag in the script.
For Writers
A naming convention rooted in the world can replace dozens of pages of characterization. What was originally in each Boxtroll’s box determines his name. The audience learns the rule once and applies it to every Boxtroll they meet. The lesson is that consistent worldbuilding details reduce the cognitive load on the reader. If you can teach the reader how something works once and then trust them to follow the rule, your worldbuilding does work without requiring page space to do it.
The Plot Problem
The script tries to do too many things.
Eggs’s identity arc. Winnie’s relationship with her absent father. Snatcher’s class climbing. The town’s exterminator system. The cheese politics. A late-act revelation about Snatcher’s true nature. A late-act revelation about Eggs’s true origin. The Boxtrolls’ culture and rituals. A romance subplot. The film has approximately four films worth of plot in eighty-nine minutes.
The clutter is partly the cost of adapting Alan Snow’s much longer novel. The book has time to develop its threads. The film doesn’t. Some characters get short shrift. Some plot turns happen before the audience has fully invested in them. The third act is energetic but not always coherent. The overcrowding is my real complaint. By the third act I’m juggling cheese politics, two revelations and a romance, and I’d have cut the romance and half the town politics without blinking.
For Writers
Adaptation requires cutting. The Boxtrolls preserves too much of Alan Snow’s novel and the film suffers for it. The writers were unwilling to throw out subplots that worked in the book but didn’t have time to develop on screen. The lesson is that adapting a novel to a feature is mostly an exercise in subtraction. Find the central spine. Cut what doesn’t serve it. The audience won’t miss what was never on screen.
Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley voices Snatcher as a man whose primary motivation isn’t malice but desperate class-climbing ambition. Snatcher wants to be a White Hat, a member of the town’s elite who get to taste cheese in the town hall. He can’t eat cheese without his head swelling grotesquely because he’s allergic. The film makes this a literal physical comedy element and a metaphor for the absurdity of the social system he’s trying to enter.
The performance is the film’s most committed element. Kingsley gives Snatcher his own voice, his own physicality (through the animators), and his own moral logic. Snatcher is funny and dangerous. The character is the best villain in any Laika production.
Kingsley is having a ball, and so am I. Snatcher swelling up over a cheese he can’t eat is the funniest thing in the film and the saddest, and I’d call it the finest villain work Laika has done.
For Writers
A villain whose ambition is social instead of territorial is harder to defeat and more interesting to write. Snatcher doesn’t want to rule. He wants to be invited to the table. Class anxiety is a more relatable motivation than world domination. The lesson is that an antagonist’s goal should connect to something the audience recognizes from real life. Snatcher’s specific desire is funny and tragic because everyone has known a Snatcher.
Craft Note
Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable co-directed. Irena Brignull and Adam Pava wrote, adapted from Alan Snow’s novel Here Be Monsters. Isaac Hempstead Wright voiced Eggs. Ben Kingsley voiced Archibald Snatcher. Elle Fanning voiced Winnie. Jared Harris voiced Lord Portley-Rind. Richard Ayoade voiced Mr. Pickles. Tracy Morgan voiced Mr. Trout. Nick Frost voiced Mr. Gristle. Laika Entertainment produced. Released September 2014. Approximately sixty million dollar budget. One hundred and ten million worldwide gross. Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards.
Is The Boxtrolls worth watching?
8/10. I’d rate it higher if the script had the nerve to cut one or two subplots, because everything else here delights me: the Boxtroll designs, the cheese-obsessed town and Ben Kingsley’s desperate, swelling Snatcher. It’s the least seen of Laika’s films and it deserves better, so watch it for the visuals and stay for Kingsley.
