I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to see The Boxtrolls. I am not familiar with the story it is based on (Here Be Monsters!), but I was definitely intrigued by the animation quality and the inventive characters. And on that front it delivers big time. Where it fails is the marketing and a little bit of its metaphorical choices.

Super cute… but turn that frown upside down and whoa.

My hesitation in going was that the trailer shows these incredibly cute, industrious, if still somewhat scary looking creatures called the Boxtrolls being hunted down by some ugly villain with a kill everything kind of zeal. And I was put off with yet another animated story, ostensibly for kids, that involves nothing less than the end of life for an entire species. It seemed loud, brash, and kind of tired for a storyline. The reality wasn’t very far from my predictions. The Boxtrolls themselves are nicely inventive, with an underground home and lifestyle which they fill with the random articles they steal from the upper world each night to build strange and harmless machinery that makes their living situation fun and comfortable. They are shy tinkerers at heart wearing boxes that act as camouflage at the first sign of danger. But being they look like… well… trolls, the upper world finds them repulsive and has trumped up stories of the man-eating, blood thirsty nature of the trolls. The legend was fueled further by the fact that the trolls took a human child years ago and raised it as their own.

This boy, named Eggs, grows up underground under the care of the troll named Fish, until an age where he can venture up to the top side world and discover his whole universe being hunted down by the treacherous Archibald Snatcher. A mean, ladder-climbing individual, Snatcher snarls evil at every breath as he tries to kill every last Boxtroll so that he might gain the favor of the cheese obsessed, town leader Lord Portley-Rind.

The Raider’s Nazi right?

And this is kind of where the movie seems a bit out of sorts with who is attending the viewings. Is this a children’s novel? I think such dark topics and imagery work better on the page, where a kid can step back from the level of terror or just choose to put the book down. However in movie form they are trapped. And I say this because to my left a young boy kept telling his parents he was scared and wanted to go home. The parents ignored him because you know… kids and their dumb fears. I watched one family walk out with their two young daughters. So what is going on here? Animated films have a bias that instantly people think they are for children, which is not a proper assumption. Then you have cute marketing that focuses on the good nature of the trolls and a lot less on the incredible level of menace and disgusting imagery of the film. There’s a scene of Snatcher having an allergic reaction to eating cheese that has his cronies cover his bloated body with leeches to bring him back to normal. There are close ups of people’s disfigured tongues eating that had G.I. Joe next to me laugh out loud and tell me it was one of the grossest images he’d seen. There’s a villain that resembles the main nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And this disfigured menacing imagery is all on purpose.

I was turned off by the bizarre premise that the town and specifically Lord Portley-Rind is so overly obsessed with cheese that he shuns his only daughter and the kidnapping of Eggs just to focus on protecting his cheese. It’s all broad brush styled writing to substitute for complex parent/child dynamics that quickly creates a conflict, but this kind of logic plays for a kid better whilst the frequently disturbing and violent imagery plays for adults better. And the expected happy ending takes another violent twist that isn’t any less pleasant than said Raiders Nazi having his face melt. Thus, my conflicted brain.

Eggs has never danced. You could say his legs get “scrambled.”

I enjoyed myself overall. The villainous henchmen have wondrously subversive, self-deprecating dialogue that is both funny and insightful in unexpected ways. The script and animation play in complete harmony, moving at a great clip and exposing the logic of the universe to great detail. One of the best scenes in the film comes when Eggs infiltrates a formal cotillion, but doesn’t know proper manners and licks one of the guests. The Boxtrolls finds many moments of levity and grand inventiveness and the stop motion animation is glorious to the point you question it’s even possible to do it via stop motion. I was never bored. I was frequently grossed out. Often laughed. Consistently  impressed. But I think in some ways this works better on paper than on film. I didn’t like the cheese universe substituting for real parent/child relationships and it’s very distracting when youngsters around you are trying to run from the room in fear.

At 96 minutes, it’s hard for me to say how long it felt because the environment had a lot to do with my perception. Go see it. Support inventive art. Just know what you are getting into. And really… now that I think of it, maybe the parents to my left ignoring the pleas of their scared child really were more like the cheese dad than I was willing to admit.