'The Boxtrolls' Stands Out

“He dresses like a boxtroll but looks like a boy!” says the man who has been hung upside down from the ceiling. He’s swinging back and forth, long beard and hair blowing, and he’s cackling madly. Good thing he’s clay animated, too, because he’s been hanging upside down for 10 years and it’s likely that this sort of treatment would kill a regular human. Despite all the extra blood in his head, the crazy man has pointed out the central conflict in the animated movie “The Boxtrolls”: the main character struggles with a dual identity of boxtroll and boy. To save himself and his boxtroll family, he must learn to accept both identities and to motivate others to stand up for themselves as well.

“The Boxtrolls,” based on an illustrated novel by Alan Snow, is as much a self-acceptance story as it is an offbeat adventure tale. The production company, Laika, also produced the animated films “ParaNorman” and “Coraline.” The aesthetic of this movie is equally uncanny, with animated bodies slightly disproportionate, hats just a bit too tall, and houses that defy the physics we know to operate in this world. The majority of the street scenes are shot low to the ground, at the eye-level of children and trolls. It’s possible to get overwhelmed by legs and protruding bellies, but the perspective feels true to the title characters who live underneath the teetering city of Cheesebridge. The creatures that populate the movie, the boxtrolls, are adorable and eerie: they have tough blue skin, blunt and square heads and teeth, and grimy bodies covered by cardboard boxes. They run around with unnerving grunts and shuffles, hiding inside their own boxes whenever humans pass by.

The saddest part of all of this is that Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), the protagonist and confused human boy, doesn’t quite fit in with the silly, spooky boxtrolls. Just as the houses jut unevenly out of the precarious streets and clothing bulges uncomfortably on uneven bodies, Eggs finds himself out of place among the trolls. His arms, legs, and head stick out of his cardboard box, he cannot make the same sounds as the boxtrolls, and he does not get captured by the dreaded Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), a terrifying cross-dresser.

Snatcher, the villain of the story, wants to exterminate all of the boxtrolls in Cheesebridge in exchange for prestige in the town. He goes to extraordinary lengths to persecute the harmless trolls, disguising himself as a traveling female performer to popularize the myth that boxtrolls steal and eat children through song and dance. He hires three henchmen, two of whom spend the whole movie debating their existential roles as the good guys or the bad guys as they scoop up boxtrolls in their nets and put them to work in a factory. In fact, many of the characters struggle with self-definition just like the farcical henchmen. Winnie (Elle Fanning) rebels against her elite, cheese-eating father to help her friend Eggs. The ruling elite of Cheesebridge hide behind tall white hats and eat cheese in gross quantities, and Archibald Snatcher struggles to be accepted by this caricature of aristocracy. Perhaps most gruesomely, Snatcher forces himself to eat cheese though he is dangerously allergic, his body ballooning in inconvenient places whenever a piece of cheese touches his tongue.

It seems that every character could learn a lesson from brave Eggs, who manages to “disguise” himself as a human and walk the line between both groups. He is able to convince the shy boxtrolls to shed their cardboard shells and save themselves, making what the crazy man hanging from the ceiling calls a “self-imposed metamorphosis.” Eggs is able to change his nature, and his act of defiance changes the prejudices of the town and an evil man out for power. “The Boxtrolls” is more than a creatively-animated movie with silly cheese puns: it’s a story about the danger of group mentality, corruption of the elite, persecution, and self-acceptance.

—Staff writer Virginia R. Marshall can be reached at virginia.marshall@thecrimson.com.