What aunt_zelda Thinks: The Box Trolls
X-posted to my tumblr
Yeah. It's just sad. Really sad.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way.
Visually this is, of course, an impressive and amazing film. Stop-motion of this quality is awesome. There are microexpressions and smooth transitions and epic action scenes. My disappointment with this film has nothing at all to do with the animation.
The henchmen. Bless them. They were great. Most of my laughs came from them, because they were awesome.
The design of ... everything. The hair, the hats, the buildings, the boxes, EVERYTHING. YES. Lovingly detailed. This is not a shoddily constructed movie by any means.
There is a moment where our protagonist can't distinguish between the men and women at a ball and even asks aloud something like "wait, how do you tell?" which is something Groot did this summer and everyone loved, so hey, a small brownie point.
There's a really great bit at the very end that is worth waiting for, after the artsy credits and before the black-background-plain-text credits.
I have one more good thing but it's a spoiler, and then will be followed by the spoilery critiques, so, beyond the cut, SPOILERS
WARNING: transmisogyny, descritpion of scenes of transmisogny below
There are TWO giant robot fight sequences. This is a rather shallow reason to praise something, but it is worth noting. The final battle is especially complex and impressive.
So ... critiques ...
The transphobic content. Is as bad as you've heard. And it could be very triggering. Based on that alone, I will not be recommending this film. The moment the "reveal" happens and the audience realizes and laughs because "lol man in a dress!" is ... painful. I can't imagine how that moment will feel for transgender people in the audience, but I'm betting "not good." There is a moment where a male character, once realizing that the villain was disguised as a woman, says "I regret so much" with a horror-stricken expression. There is a scene during a battle where the male villain was rushed from his previous scene of being dressed as a lady, and thus attacks our heroes in his male clothes with *horror* half his lipstick still on, to make him more threatening and monstrous. I wish I were making this up. But no, the sight of a man with remnants of his female costume on is supposed to make him scarier. Because anyone stepping outside the gender binary = monstrous, evil, scary, and bad, and must be punished by society.
This is not at all what you'd expect from the studio that gave us ParaNorman, to say the least.
While we're on the subject of this movie, let's talk about another problem. The classism in this movie.
Yes, really. Let's go here.
The villain (the aforementioned "oh the horrors, a man in a dress!" character) is a man of the lower class trying to rise to the upper class. he is desperate to join them. The upper class are insistent that he shall never join them and should know his place, beneath them, and he will never enter their inner sanctum and be accepted as one of them. The villain is so desperate to join the upper class that he practices at being upper class, and does things that cause him great physical agony, because they're the things the upper class does. And he wants to be part of the upper class so very, very much.
In another movie this character would be our hero, struggling against the pompous and moronic upper class and fighting his way to the top.
Instead he is ridiculed, denied again and again, by the gatekeepers, and told to know his place and that he will NEVER be "one of us."
Pretty nasty message for a movie all on its own. So, even without the transmisogyny, there would be big problems with the villain. Oh the horrors of an ugly, gross, lower class *gasp* upstart trying to join the upper crust! How dare he! Thank goodness he explodes at the end of the film and social order is not upset! Whatever would we do if the disgusting lower class made their way to the top? That would be MONSTROUS.
(Note that nobody transcends their social order by the end of the film. Instead of being rewarded for their heroism the lower class henchmen work menial jobs of the same class level they worked before, with the same red hats. Maybe the box trolls, by joining the middle class, but they're just doing what they did before, just aboveground as well as underground. They didn't jump a class level, they were just no longer being hunted down and "exterminated" and called child-stealing/eating monsters blamed for society's ills ... hang on ... wait, no, no, not going there, NOT GOING THERE. SOMEONE ELSE CAN GO THERE I'M ALREADY TALKING ABOUT TOO MANY THINGS.)
The plot is a mess. Just ... a mess. There are set pieces the characters stumble through and it all looks great, but it's a mess. The opening is great, really really great, but the rest of the film doesn't keep up with that. Revelations about characters are rushed through and not given enough weight, characters blunder in and out (oh hai, long-lost father I thought was murdered, suddenly alive, suddenly not insane, so convenient, let's speak like three times in the whole movie, etc.), and the narrative is just ... messy. It's a mess. Which is really disappointing. And what even was the message/point/plot? "Be yourself but wait no, be who you were raised as/fathers are the most important thing/crossdressing is evil/don't try to change your social standing/fight your Nature in a world where everyone else is an asshole?" Honestly you could make a case for all of those and more besides.
This movie should have gone through several more drafts before being made. There was a great story in here, somewhere, but it wasn't ready yet. It was a good three-six months of solid rewriting away.
Also, the Box Trolls are too cowardly to RUN AWAY AND ESCAPE CERTAIN DEATH and just sit unresistingly in a death trap they could escape if only they took a step to the left. Until our protagonist yells at them to SAVE THEMSELVES by TAKING A STEP TO THE LEFT. There are no chains, no nothing, holding them in place. These creatures are so peaceful and nonviolent they will literally sit and wait for death than save themselves.
I don't know what the fuck that's about but I found it kind of awful, and a pretty lazy excuse for them to be captured. Why make them pacifists to the point of sitting and waiting to die? Why? I don't understand.
The reason I saw this movie was because I was wicked excited for it for so long, and made plans with a friend to go see it. This friend had a panic attack last weekend and ended up not going out to the movies with me and some of my other friends. We had talked about seeing The Boxtrolls a while back. So this weekend we went to see The Boxtrolls, even though I knew it would be transmisogynistic, because I'd promised him before I knew about this, and he was having a bad time of things.
We had a great night out. We both agreed the film wasn't nearly as strong as Laika's previous films, and had major flaws. And he agreed that the whole "man in a dress: lol how terrible" thing was pretty awful for the movie to pull.
Because it was. And this movie was a big disappointment. And I hope Laika hears the complaints and critiques and changes its outlook for the future. Because I love this company and I want them to make more films, BETTER films, and improve and keep going.
But this film was a let down.