Starring: Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley
With the association with Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, Laika have been one of the animation companies still flying the flag for stop-motion as well as providing films mainly aimed at children but still getting in plenty of gunk and creepy-crawlies. I enjoyed their previous project, Paranorman, even if I felt it may have been too strong a piece of meat for young audiences. Boxtrolls comes off as gentler and more in mind for the pre-teen demographic, but it loses some of that inspiration along the way.
Set in a quaint implicitly British town beset by squat underground-dwelling creatures who wear cardboard boxes (the titular boxtrolls), the main character is Egg (so named for the cardboard box for eggs that he wears), a human boy raised by the trolls who seeks to defend the innocent if ugly trolls from the fearful townspeople and especially Snatcher, an ambitious cheese-obsessed villain voiced by Ben Kingsley clearly in a mood more silly than serious. Kingsley's casting is unusual, but the same can be said of Maleficent and Super 8 actress Elle Fanning (sister of Coraline star, Dakota) as Egg's young human ally, but she does a good job. Whilst other voices include Richard Ayoade, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and perhaps the oddest choice, a pretty much unrecognisable Tracey Morgan.
As with most films tagged with being 3D, this is a practically pointless addition and you won't lose anything and save money by going to see it in 2D. The animation is nicely detailed and with some good character detail that comes to the fore in this medium of animation So far as recommending the film as a whole goes, fans of earlier Laika and Selick films (or those who like their children stories with a Roald Dahl sense of icky mischief) will probably appreciate this and the few chuckles it provides, but it's by no means their strongest work.
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