Through the cheese, darkly
THE BOXTROLLS
out of 5 Starring: Simon Pegg, Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Toni Collette, Tracy Morgan Directed by: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi Running time: 97 minutes
Cheese: We say it with a smile, but it always feels a little forced because we’re doing it for the frame. Cheesy: It’s what we call things that seem cheap and kitschy.
So may the dairy producers of the world forgive me, and those responsible for The Boxtrolls, for suggesting cheese has a dark side. Indeed, that creamy curd has a mouldy essence that reeks of old-school values, as well as old-school gym lockers, and The Boxtrolls saturates every whiff with social satire as it makes cheese the symbol of modern overconsumption.
Using a blend of stop-motion and digital tools to animate Alan Snow’s children’s novel Here Be Monsters!, the filmmakers take us into a subterranean world populated by trolls who are so modest, they wear a variety of boxes scavenged from the human world above.
As a result, they have names such as Eggs, Fish, Fragile, Matches. You get the idea. They seem nice enough, but for some reason, they are feared on the surface. An entire war against the so-called “monsters” was created for political purposes, and now they face extinction.
The person responsible is Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), a man who seeks to wear a white hat and eat delicious cheeses with the upper crust. He thinks he will rise to the highest cheese tray in the known universe if he kills every last boxtroll. And so far, he is succeeding. The only thing he never counted on was the boxtrolls having a human ally. And not only an ally, but a boy raised as a boxtroll himself by a boxtroll godfather.
Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) can speak boxtroll as well as the big cheese’s English, and as a result offers the perfect bridge between the troll world in the sewers below and the human world above.
Through Eggs, we begin to see how the humans are just like the trolls, only our boxes are much bigger. They are called houses and offices and they have addresses, but they still define us to the same degree as our actual names. And they all reflect just as little of our inner truth as any cardboard box can.
Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi create a colourful world that plays with this larger box metaphor in small ways, preferring to leave all the broad strokes of the storytelling to the clay-like clumps of character. Because they have so much texture and every close-up allows us to see a trace of something entirely human in its imperfections, the visuals are engaging and accessible, and they feel significantly different from the average kids’ movie.
The whole mood is dark and creepy, yet wonderfully cheesy in the way every kids’ movie has to be: There must be something life-affirming at the end, even if it feels forced and false.
The Boxtrolls cuts that cheese with pride, and a real sense of purpose, resulting in a surprisingly strong statement that lingers long after you’ve left the theatre.