The animators at Laika Studios, creators of Coraline and Paranorman, are masters of texture. Using handmade figures and sets, Laika uses stop-motion animation to make possible impossible worlds full of palpable wonder. Their images are so tangible, they morph the inherent distance of cinema. Their films’ invite their audience not only to watch but to step into their worlds. Sadly, the deception of cinema remains, because, despite the beckoning, the viewer can only stay in the theater, infinitely distant from the world on the screen.
Laika’s new film The Boxtrolls is stamped with its signature quality. Equal parts grotesque, mischievous, whimsical, and horrific, the film uses its visual texture as a lens to explore the fractured communal texture of the fictional Victorian town of Cheesebridge.
Above ground live the local townsfolk, a community led by a group of haughty, male cheese-lovers known as the White Hats. Their sole economic resource is their beloved cheese. The only thing that seems to bring this community together is their shared hatred and fear of their subterranean neighbors. Underneath the village dwells the titular boxtrolls, trolls who literally wear boxes. They gorge themselves on bugs, sleep in their boxes stacked atop one another, and communicate through series of grunts and chest beating. Boxtrolls seem scary, but in truth, they are kind, shy creatures.
The link between the townsfolk and the boxtrolls is Eggs, a supposedly missing, reportedly eaten boy. He is actually alive and well and part of the boxtroll family. After finding out about a White Hat plot to exterminate the boxtrolls, Eggs and his new human friend, Winnifred, devise a plan to save them. Serving as the mediator between the two societies, it is through the bravery of Eggs that the communities are forced to confront one another.
The main visual aesthetic of this film is an unnerving grotesquerie. This aspect reflects the broken and disfigured nature of the town’s society. The villain’s scenes are the most disgusting. Snatcher is a rat-like human, with splotchy face, crooked teeth, massive stomach and skinny appendages. He is also allergic to cheese – ironic for a rat seeking to become a part of a high society that is essentially a cheese-tasting club. When he eats cheese, his skin swells repulsively and only blood-sucking leeches can control the reaction. The visuals are a blend of the absurd grotesquerie of old Monty Python films and the dark, repulsiveness of Fincher’s Se7en.
The jarring visual aesthetic is not a problem in itself, because the world is quite affecting at times, but as a whole, the film is empty. Interesting characters and explorations of how communities can be torn apart by myths spun to justify societal fear are lost to action and plot in the third act. The film is ultimately too distracted by its obsession with crafting the most grotesque and macabre world imaginable to tell a truly affecting story. It indulges in its visual flourishes simply because it can.
In that sense the filmmakers seem to have made a surrogate for themselves in the likeable yet strange character of Winnifred. She is obsessed with death and the myth of the boxtrolls as savage beasts to the point of wanting to be abducted by them. Desperately attached to the gore of the myth, she would even risk having her intestines eaten with only her bones left to mark her existence. The filmmakers are so attached to their own grotesque visuals that the story and its characters are left wanting. The Boxtrolls has the bones of a story but no real flesh to animate it. It’s a palpable visual feast full of off-kilter humor, but in the end, a bit of an empty box.
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