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Sep 26, 2014 By Austin Trunick Web Exclusive

As computer animation continues to make the traditional forms seem more antiquated, unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming, the work coming out of the studios who stand by the old techniques only gets more impressive. Laika, the Oregon-based company that previously produced Coraline and ParaNorman, trade purely in the most tedious-seeming animation technique of all: stop-motion. Their results are magical; the team’s puppets look and move as nicely as any computer-generated specimen, and arguably possess more heart. The results are only more impressive when you remember that, say, to show show a single boxtroll turn its head, smile, and eat a bug, it probably took a crew of animators a full week’s worth of effort. That in mind, the scale of The Boxtrolls is incredible, requiring 79 sets to be built to house 190 individual puppets with 53,000 interchangeable facial pieces.

Beyond its technical achievement, The Boxtrolls is a fun, family-friendly fantasy with a cool steampunk aesthetic. The boxtrolls live in the sewers beneath the Victorian city of Cheesebridge. Ten years earlier, a baby disappeared from the home of a local inventor, presumably – as the townsfolk suspect – stolen and eaten by the boxtrolls. The city’s highfalutin upper class – designated by their fancy white hats – hire a group of enterprising thugs to sweep the streets and exterminate every last boxtroll as they make their nightly scavenging trips amongst the city’s trash heaps. Underground, though, we’re shown their fears are overblown; the boxtrolls never ate the missing child, but raised him as one of their own. Now ten years old, Eggs – named so, after the label printed on the cardboard box he wears over his torso – believes himself to be one of the knee-high boxtrolls, and adventures forth above-ground to put a stop to his kindred’s extermination.

The story is pretty predictable even for a children’s feature, but the visuals are breathtaking in their intricacy. (The film was shot in stereoscopic 3D, and should be rightfully seen that way.) For adults whom aren’t satisfied just to marvel at the film’s mechanics, there’s plenty of smart, mature humor, and a great voice cast which includes Ben Kingsley, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tracy Morgan and Jared Harris.

www.TheBoxtrolls.com

Author rating: 7/10