Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Alan Snow, boxtrolls, entertainment, film, Focus Features, Here Be Monsters

The Boxtrolls – A Movie Review

This week we see the release of The Boxtrolls on Blu-ray and DVD. The film is a stop-motion animation based on the novel Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow. I got a chance to watch the film last night and I have to say that I have some mixed feelings about it.

Visually the movie is stunning. The characters look amazing, the boxtrolls are charming and just from an animation standpoint this is wonderful work. The facial details, the sculps they use and the backgrounds really make for a unique and believable world. There is even a bit at the end where two characters go a bit meta and talk about how their lives would be if they were stop-motion characters in a film and we see a time-lapse of the scene being filmed and the animators stepping in and out to make the changes.

So visually this film is worth watching.

On the other hand, story wise this film is worth avoiding. The plot is surprisingly simple with a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in it. The basics is there is a class system based on the color of your hat, White being the upper class, and one devious man with a red hat hatches a plan to move him up in society where the big things is to sit around a tasting room and eat cheese. Part of his plan is to create a machine that would allow him to catch boxtrolls and eliminate them from the town. The plot hole is that he needs boxtrolls to make his machine and by the time the machine is done there are hardly any boxtrolls left for it to capture… he was pretty efficient doing the capturing without his big capturing machine. All of this so he can get a white hat and each cheese… which he is horribly allergic to.

Basically you have two groups here, the humans and the boxtrolls. The humans are across the board despicable from the villain using the boxtrolls for his own purposes, the white hats who ignore everything else except cheese or even the little girl who is so fascinated with gore that she's really kind of creepy. On the other hand there are the boxtrolls who are cute and cowardly and only seem to know how to run and hide. The connector between the two is a baby that the boxtrolls are accused of stealing, Eggs. Eggs is the one redeeming character in the film and he's only redeeming because he was raised by boxtrolls away from anything human.

The rest of the movie is made up of humans being horrible. The boxtrolls cowering and no one listening to each other. I'm not a father, but I would be very hesitant to let any child of mine watch this film. There is so many bizarre things going on here that I just don't think would be appropriate for the target age group. And all of that aside, the way the villain reacts to eating cheese is so grotesque and horrifying to the point of him literally exploding that I could see children being afraid of eating cheese after seeing this film.

The trailer for this film gave us the promise of a new world of characters done in brilliant stop-motion animation, the problem is the world they delivered may be fun to look at, but it's not one I'd want to visit.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!