Monday, March 20, 2017

Laika Week, part III: Frankly, he's done rather well for a kid with pronounced, disabling rickets


The good times at Laika just keep on rolling, with the kid's gross-out flick to beat them all.

Directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi
Written by Irena Brignull, Adam Pava, Phil Dale, Vera Brosgol, and Anthony Stucchi (based on the book Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow)
With Isaac Hempstead Wright (Eggs), Elle Fanning (Winnifred Portley-Rind), Dee Bradley Baker (Fish), Steve Blum (Shoe), Simon Pegg (Herbert Trubshaw), Jared Harris (Lord Portley-Rind), Nick Frost (Mr. Trout), Richard Ayoade (Mr. Pickles), Tracy Morgan (Mr. Gristle), and Ben Kingsley (Archibald Snatcher)

Spoiler alert: moderate

I think the hardest thing to like about Laika's third feature, The Boxtrolls, must be its premise, borrowed largely intact from Alan Snow's illustrated novel, Here Be Monsters!, in contrast to the book's actual plot, which was almost completely abandoned.  No, there's just something weirdly arbitrary, and self-evidently brainstormed, about the film's titular race of nocturnal gremlins who speak exclusively in Frank Welkerese (even though their human ward speaks English) and spend their lives walking around in repurposed shipping crates.  And whatever that something is, it simply sticks ever-so-slightly in the craw.

Indeed, for all the many, many interesting visuals this premise permits—the geometric precision of the boxtrolls' sleeping arrangements; the vertiginous descent into the boxtroll cavern borne on a rolling belt; the sheer cuteness of the moment when our human protagonist loses his ill-fitting box, which is treated by his compatriots as horrifying "nudity"—for all that, it's still hard to shake the negative first impression given by the promotional art.  And that's even when you consider the matter, and realize that the boxtrolls' cardboard accoutrements do make a certain kind of sense, after all: for these pacifist rascals rather plainly evolved to wear boxes as their sole defense against their enemies, thereby turning purloined human trash into a specifically urban form of camouflage.  (Of course, here in our setting of Cheesebridge, one imagines that keeping boxes outside at night has been outlawed for years; and, certainly, by the time our story begins in earnest, the boxtrolls' disguises have been rendered so obsolete they're counterproductive.)

So it helps a lot more, if we're being honest, if you simply watch it three times—twice in a week, for best results—until you get so accustomed to what you're watching that it stops seeming forced and starts seeming natural.  Obviously, the fact that the Boxtrolls' wickedly great little movie manages to stay wickedly great on a third spin suggests that there's something—something else, that is—equally compelling about its monsters' curious, overcalculated aesthetic, even when it seems like it's daring you to be baffled and indifferent toward it.

In any event, it's surely much easier to be charmed by The Boxtrolls the more used to it you get (on this third time around, I finally noticed that the 'troll with no teeth and stolen, ill-fitting dentures is also the one named "Sweets," which is rather hilarious despite never being remotely stressed by the movie itself).  Nonetheless, there's much that's already quite effortlessly charming about Boxtrolls, even on the first time through.

And so that brings us to Cheesebridge—a fairy tale city, existing in a 19th century English neverwhen, and built upon the steep sides of a mountain, apparently for no special reason except to look striking and, from time to time, to allow our heroes to have some fun with gravity.  Cheesebridge, as the name suggests, revolves almost entirely around its ruling class's obsession with their favorite food.  But no inhabitant of Cheesebridge is more obsessed with cheese, and the power it represents, than a certain upstart commoner, the aptly-named Archibald Snatcher.

Lately, Cheesebridge's peaceful prosperity has come under threat, but for a man like Snatcher, public danger only means an opportunity for advancement.  The town's problem is the aforementioned boxtrolls, who've become a most disagreeable nuisance, sneaking up from the sewers each night to steal everything that catches their fancy, especially pieces of metal and machinery that they can use themselves, down in their industrialized, underground lair.  And when the 'trolls steal an actual child, Snatcher seizes the mandate from Cheesebridge's absentminded potentate, Lord Portley-Rind, to rid their city of its infestation for good.  But Snatcher demands a concession: in exchange for the elimination of the boxtrolls, Snatcher shall be awarded a precious white hat, along with all the privileges (mainly cheese-related) that come with it; Portley-Rind, though openly contemptuous of this amoral striver, agrees.  Thus does Snatcher's mad pursuit begin.

As for the babe the boxtrolls carried away, the people of Cheesebridge presume they ate him.  But we soon discover that this isn't the case at all: the child, dubbed "Eggs" after the box the 'trolls stuffed him in, in accordance with their custom, becomes a son to the one who took him, Fish (and some kind of fondly-regarded nephew, one supposes, to Fish's counterpart, Shoe).  Ten years on, Eggs has started to join in on the boxtrolls' nightly escapades, and so Eggs is on hand to witness Snatcher's depredations, which have badly depopulated the boxtroll colony, something which the boxtrolls themselves barely seem to have noticed.  Indeed, it's not long before Fish himself is snatched.  Eggs, unique amongst the boxtrolls in possessing both a backbone and a sense of agency, determines to at least try to do something.  And so, venturing to the surface world "in disguise," he meets the daughter of Portley-Rind, young Winnie, who recognizes him immediately for what he is—a boy—though it takes some time before Eggs even begins to believe her.  In the meantime, the two manage to save Fish, but in the process they stumble upon Snatcher's Final Solution to the Boxtroll Question—and now, what began as a purely personal quest turns into a mission to save the whole boxtroll race from extinction.

You know, what Sir Ben Kingsley might describe as an "absolute good."

Impressively bleak, but hardly revolutionary: it's a fable of fantastic racism of pretty much the exact same type you've seen one thousand times before, meshed with the old story about the special lad raised by the [insert fictionalized creature here], so that, when his appointed hour arrived, he could, at last, bridge the gap between the humans he came from and the "monsters" he now claims as his own.  The Boxtrolls, essentially, is the tale of Tarzan, as raised by Hortas.

So, even amongst the Laika canon, feted more for technical prowess than storytelling sophistication, it stands out as hidebound.  Consider: Coraline is so old-fashioned and elemental that it somehow seems fresh; ParaNorman is so dark, and ultimately so honest about the real emotions undergirding its polemic, that it's impossible to say it doesn't earn its own boilerplate; and, finally, though it was presently just a glimmer in Laika CEO Travis Knight's eye, Kubo and the Two Strings would soon add an ambitious self-mythologizing component to its otherwise by-the-numbers adventure narrative.

Boxtrolls, meanwhile, really is a kid's movie, with kid's movie narrative beats and a kid's movie message.  The thing is, it's such a good kid's movie—and in such specific, almost-unique ways—that it doesn't really matter that its general shape is essentially identical to dozens of other kid's movies about bigotry.  (For just one example, take The Jetsons Movie, which has almost exactly the same plot—including the genocide—and even has almost the same "monsters.")

Now, the old stuff works: it's not as if Boxtrolls has trotted out some unacceptable piece of moral edification.  What we get is unimpeachably righteous indeed, all about not judging a book by its cover, and about not enslaving disfavored minorities, then slaughtering them all when you're done extracting their labor—to its credit, Boxtrolls is at least rather unsparingly forthright in its metaphors—and all of it with only the tiniest dash of white savior, for seasoning (unavoidably, really, inasmuch as white saviors are nearly inextricable from this kind of story).  It probably doesn't hurt The Boxtrolls' legacy that it feels rather less like a fantasy today than it did back in 2014, when our own world was still sane.

But it's still the littler details that make it a classic: the detail of its craftsmanship, for one thing, that treats its creaky old narrative like it was new and shiny and important, both in terms of storytelling and (especially) in terms of Laika's beyond-the-impossible stop-motion technology.  Yet maybe even more importantly than that, we have The Boxtrolls' mile-wide streak of genuinely naughty humor, so well-attuned to what kids actually like (and what the kid within every adult actually likes) that you can completely ignore its story's bid for significance, and simply enjoy it as the line upon which directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stucchi string a series of moments that range from the strangely, counter-intuitively endearing to the absolutely, wonderfully, and nauseatingly gross, to the point that even though kids do like this kind of thing, you kind of wonder if they should be encouraged to.

This is the movie where the villain, who wants the cheese, refuses to acknowledge that he's explosively allergic to cheese.  (And hi-jinx most definitely ensue.)

Obviously, any kid's movie that arrives at anything like The Boxtrolls' stunning denouement was, by definition, always on the right track; but it's hard to name any kid's blechh-fest that does this kind of comedy better, including its own predecessors in stop-motion grotesquerie.  For all its holocaustal analogies, it's still a mostly-breezy venture through the world of Cheesebridge, and it starts with its amazing production design, which is Burtonesque to the tenth power (or, if you must, Selickian), only in more than two or three colors: what we have in Cheesebridge is a half-rotten, half-cozy steampunkish wonderland, without a single leveling tool to call its own, and where the only straight lines in sight occur when objects literally could not work without them (like the hanging chains in the exterminators' warehouse, or the pulley system on Snatcher's turn-of-the-20th-century mecha—and yes, this movie's climax does hinge upon an awesome stop-motion-animated steampunk mecha, and yet I would still call it cool).

It keeps going with its character designs, beginning with the snaggled teeth and rosacea-tinged bitchfaces of its somehow-adorable leads, while only getting more agreeably-repugnant the closer we get to our hissable villains.  Altogether, The Boxtrolls' characters represent perhaps the most preciously-ugly cartoons since Nightmare Before Christmas (and, all things considered, it betters Selick's own grossest effort).  And here, the majority of this cast doesn't even have the excuse of being actual monsters.  The extermination team could fool you, though: besides Snatcher himself, a gaudy collection of Dickensian bad dreams rolled into one effluent package, the other three (Messires Pickle, Trout, and Gristle) all look like half-reanimated corpses—while Gristle, in particular, is distinguishable from the boxtrolls only because he's not wearing a box, isn't green, and is actively psychotic.  (Tracy Morgan, who plays Gristle, gets only about a dozen lines throughout the movie, but they are all just flawlessly read.)

Which is as good a segue into the cast as we're going to get—and all of them know what movie they're in, an exercise in camp so prononced that it comes back 'round to drama.  The whole film benefits from a deep bench of marginally-famous people clearly chosen for their perfect idiosyncrasies.  And so Richard Ayoade, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Jared Harris—all in all, it's got nearly as many Brits-per-frame as a Harry Potter movie—each get something excellent to sink their teeth into.  Meanwhile, the lead role devolves to Isaac Hempstead Wright, who isn't even off-brand famous, but winds up being ideal as the quiet, awkward, dispirited Eggs anyway.

It probably goes without saying, however, that the marquee name is on the marquee for a reason—though you could watch this movie a dozen times, and never know it was Ben Kingsley behind Snatcher, as long as you never looked at the credits.  But for once the old stalwart is living back up to his reputation—in fact, he's frankly amazing, chewing the scenery and puking the scenery back out in equal measure, with ludricrously overextended enunciations that must have cost Laika an extra $10,000 in animation each time he struck upon a vowel.  It was worth it anyway, for Sir Ben's vowels embody a viciousness that clearly takes an immense pleasure in itself, even while Snatcher's actual ambitions are, in and of themselves, almost pathetic in their small-mindedness.  It is too much to say Kingsley is the movie—there's too many great turns to reliably count—but only one other actor is working on his level, and it's probably the last one you expect—the very American and very young (and, otherwise, not seemingly all-that-talented) Elle Fanning, who manages both a character and an accent, and was either directed, or chose of her own volition, to read her lines as if the legends of the boxtrolls' cannibalistic, family-annihilating ultraviolence had activated within Winnie's prepubescent bosom an explicit sexual paraphilia.

Her disappointment, as you might imagine, is deeply felt.

That loops us back around to The Boxtrolls' brightly-morbid sense of humor, which probably could have been a giant albatross around the picture's neck if it weren't handled just right.  It is, though, and maybe what leavens it is the ineluctable Britishness of it—gross-out gags may be The Boxtrolls' stock-in-trade, but they're only part and parcel with its comedy of manners and its infinitely-silly wordplay (the film's first line, I think, is Snatcher bellowing "The unspeakable has happened!  We must speak of it!"; one of his last is "Stop destroying my indestructible machine!").  And a huge amount of all three wind up driven by Eggs' fish-out-of-water comedy, which pretty much never fails to get a laugh.  Leave it to the Americans to get the honest-to-God cackle, though: besides Morgan's general excellence, Fanning's "Did they eat your parents?  Did they let you watch?" is, probably needless to say, by far the best line even in a film with a host of great ones.

It comes down (again) to a mastery of rapidly-shifting tones that, in some ways, might even beat out ParaNorman on the merits of its technique, if not in its profound effect; Boxtrolls so easily moves between feelings that it can be funny, dramatic, heartwarming, and kind of icky all at the same time, an emotional kaleidoscope best represented by Eggs' growing-up montage, which quotes imagery from (of all the damned things) Mark Romanek's Nine Inch Nails' video "Closer" (with a teddy bear head spinning on a mechanical pike), but somehow also has the power to make your heart swell at Eggs' relationship with his boxtroll-dad—right before it makes your heart drop at the simple little dissolve of the boxtrolls' sleeping stack diminishing, year after terrible year.  In the end, it even winds up managing to tap into a genuine intensity—despite the lack of any full-tilt urgency to preface it—and, for the first time, Snatcher even becomes a little bit legitimately frightening.

Indeed, there's a lot of darkness and weirdness right under the surface here, waiting to get out, and Boxtrolls, despite its kid's movie bona fides, only cops out the once, in regards to a certain crushing machine and the exterminators' apparent belief that boxtrolls don't have any goo inside them, such as might make a mess out of a box, were you to a smash it with its attending troll still inside.  (Meanwhile, it only goes too far the once, too, with a subplot that would probably come off as less transphobic if it seemed at all particularly motivated; but it does at least have the decency to be funny—not to mention British—and these two qualities tend to forgive any number of sins.)

Whereas the fact it permits a pretty great musical number covers up all the rest.

And all this, without even mentioning what might be the best part of it, the part that actually makes me cry, though I can't for the life of me explain why it does—that little intra-credits affair, that takes a step back behind the camera and reveals to us, in fast-motion, the monumental labor and painstaking care that goes into even the briefest moment of Laika's immaculate artistry.

It is, all in all, another masterpiece; and three times makes a tradition, they say.  With Coraline, ParaNorman, and this, the tradition Laika had inaugurated was the production of outrageously-brilliant family cartoons every two or three years, each capable of standing up to the best their competitors could throw at them, often beating them at their own game entirely—artistically, I mean (because, obviously, they've never stood up commercially)—but, if we want to get down to brass tacks, a streak of three perfect or nearly-perfect films is better than even Pixar ever managed, while Disney itself only ever equaled it that one long-ago time, almost eighty years in the past, back when the world was practically new.  Of course, all good things, even the best things, come to an end, and—sadly, but inevitably—Laika would not keep its streak alive.  Next was Kubo, and I've spoken on that already.  So, Laika may or may not return to form—who can say?  (Kubo made so little money that I suppose it must be possible that they may not return at all.)  But even if they don't, they've still made their mark—and in all the decades to come, their first three films shall still be remembered as one of the most legendary sustained achievements in animation history.

Score:  10/10

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