I have kids that range in age from 14 to 5, so I see more
than my fair share of movies directed at the middle school, grade school,
preschool set, especially cartoons. You know how Netflix gives you
recommendations based on the movies that get watched the most on your account?
Well, even though it’s my account, thanks to my kids, almost all the recommendations
I receive involve talking animals, pink dream houses, or Powerpuff Girls.
Having watched as many kids’ movies as I have, the one thing I know for sure is
that, like just about everything else people produce in this world, there’s a
wide spectrum of quality available out there.
There are the soaring, life-changing, gut busting pieces of art that send you out of the theater excited and dizzy with beauty and entertainment. (Most of Pixar’s body of work falls under this category along with The Iron Giant, The Triplets of Belleville, The Thief and the Cobbler, and some others.)
Then there are the cynical, rushed, only designed to make a
few bucks in the summer, ready-made for McDonald’s happy meal movies that send
you out the theater feeling a little ripped off that you will never get that 88
minutes or 9 dollars back. I don’t want to offend anybody by name-checking
their kid’s favorite movie, but I know that you know what I’m talking about.
But there’s also the middle ground – animated films that
have high quality aspects to them but never really congeal into something great
that moves kids and adults alike. It’s this middle category into which this
week’s movie, The Boxtrolls, falls.
The movie is a fairy tale about a young boy named Eggs who
is raised by the friendly, lumpish trolls who live under the city of
Cheesebridge. The Cheesebridgians think the trolls are evil, baby-stealing
monsters while in reality they’re harmless trash pickers who just happened to
be green and have glowing yellow eyes. Of course, the conflict comes when the
above-grounders hire a grotesque exterminator to get rid of the supposed menace
below, and young Eggs uses his dual citizenship to try and save the only family
he’s ever known.
The film was produced with stop-motion animation and was
made by the same company that made the equally elaborate Coraline and
Paranorman. Every set, every stitch of costuming, and every gesture or blink of
each character is painstakingly created by hand. Animators spend months and months
moving small puppets bit by bit and photographing it as they go. It’s a
remarkably labor-intensive way to produce a movie and the filmmaker’s care and
attention to design really shows. In fact, it’s in the production design that
the movie is strongest – it’s beautiful to look at in an idiosyncratic kind of
way. The city of Cheesebridge towers pendulously above the landscape, the
troll’s underground cavern is both clever and lovely, and the giant, mechanical
troll snatching machine that’s part of the film’s climax is a steampunk fan’s
dream.
But the characters, while well-designed and certainly well
voiced by actors like Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Nick Frost, and Tracy Morgan,
don’t really rise above their generic place-holder status. I was never swept up
into the narrative or felt for the characters the way I did in, say Ratatouie
or The Incredibles. The filmmakers seem to have paid more attention to the
monumental task of creating and animating an entire physical world from scratch
than they did to creating characters that go beyond generic expectations.
This is not to say it’s a bad film. It’s not at all. It’s
just not a great one. Kids will like it, and as a parent, you probably won’t
mind sitting through it too. One warning though, for very young kids, there are
a few moments that skirt the edge of a bit too scary. Archibald Snatcher, the
head boxtroll exterminator, is extremely allergic to cheese, but because eating
cheese is what the upper-class people do – he eats it anyway. His grotesque
Jekyll and Hyde reactions to the tiniest taste are hilarious and a marvel of
animation but they are also pretty intense for little kids, so beware.
This review was originally broadcast on Q90.1, Delta College Public Radio. Learn more about the station at www.deltabroadcasting.org.
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