Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Mehdi Hoffman There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Pjtaylor-96-138044 'The Boxtrolls (2014)' is Laika's weakest effort for sure, but is still a charming and beautifully animated stop-motion feature that might skew slightly younger than the studio's other flicks but still retains its own edge which allows it to sit comfortably in the realm of family entertainment, as opposed to entirely childish fare. The story itself is quite contrived and yet does take a couple of risks in the latter half which pay off pretty well. There's an underlying darkness not quite as apparent as 'Coraline (2009)', 'ParaNorman (2011)' or even 'Kubo And The Two Strings (2016)', but it still dares to go deeper than most films of the kind and, as such, tells a nuanced and properly exciting tale. It's really the amazing aesthetic that will carry you through the entirety of the swiftly moving piece, though. While the flick may not affect you emotionally, it will surely make you smile once or twice. 7/10

Tweekums In the town of Cheesebridge to citizens live in fear of the sewer-dwelling Boxtrolls who emerge at night and reportedly took and devoured a baby! Archibald Snatcher offers to catch and exterminate the monsters in exchange for a place on the town council so he can eat fine cheese and converse with the upper echelons of Cheesebridge society. It turns out that the stories about the Boxtrolls are untrue; far from eating the baby they raised him as one of their own; now known as Eggs he thinks he is a Boxtroll. One night he is seen Winnie, the daughter of city leader Lord Portley-Rind, who is fascinated with the Boxtrolls and the horrible things they are rumoured to do. After Egg's friend, Fish, is captured he returns to the surface and is shocked to learn what the people think about the Boxtrolls; he approaches Winnie to ask where Snatcher takes the captured trolls. He manages to rescue Fish and learns a shocking truth about Snatcher; if he is to save his friends he will have to work with Winnie and the Boxtrolls to defeat Snatcher.As with other films from Laika this film has some delightfully dark moments… Winnie's theories about what Boxtrolls do to people are particularly gruesome and there are some scary moments might scare younger children. Older children and adult viewers should really enjoy it though. The Boxtrolls are strangely endearing and the villain is delightfully grotesque… and gets worse when he eats the cheese he so desperately craves. There are times when it looks as if something bad happens to characters we are meant to like but in each case we later learn they are okay. Not surprisingly the stop-go animation is very good and the setting is beautifully realised with a really grungy look and some nice steampunk features. Overall I'd definitely recommend this to fans of Laika's other films or of animated features in general.

yo-56 This movie clearly motivates itself around good vs. evil and Nazi/holocaust plot themes, but the delivery is poor due to the overuse of 4th-wall breaking meta-dialog, which involves characters that are supposed to be dumb underlings talking intellectually/philosophically about their misgiving in their role in the lead character's scheme. A better script would have shown occasional pangs of guilt or confusion in an otherwise clueless character, offering more emotion and subtlety and inviting empathy on the part of the audience. Instead, the overwrought dialog is too on-the-nose for adults, yet too complex for children. The lead villain (Snatcher) is simultaneously quite brilliant yet also remarkably dense at times (such as in the first cheese-eating incident, where the henchman run intellectual rings around him, for some unmotivated reason). I suppose this conjures up old Gargamel (Smurfs), who plays this duality brilliantly in the original cartoons, but it somehow doesn't play well here. The henchmen characters also make frequent references to the story as if they were outside of it. This is an inside joke for the writers, presumably, but it's really not all that funny for the rest of us. Nothing is gained by taking us out of the story experience; the joke is stale (and not cleverly executed).The animation is wonderful, however, and I believe it's actually stop-motion, not computer animation, which makes it really phenomenal.

TxMike I viewed this on DVD from my public library. It has a number of interesting extras on the DVD, and a couple of time-lapse shots of an animator sequentially moving the claymation figures to generate an animated sequence.When I initially tried to watch this I turned it off after maybe 10 or 12 minutes. It was too ugly and dark to be fun. A few days later I tried again and it really picks up after 15 or 16 minutes when the story gets above ground again.It is a strange fantasy city where an ogre of a man and his helpers have convinced the general population that the Boxtrolls are monsters, they kidnap and eat children, citing the disappearance some 10 or so years earlier of a baby. The Boxtrolls are sort of like Hermit crabs, taking a discarded shell for their homes. But these discarded shells are cardboard boxes, and each gets his name from what was in the box originally, like "Eggs" or "Fish." They live underground and come out at night to collect items that have been discarded and make things with them. And in fact, the boy called Eggs, now about 10, was raised by the Boxtrolls because the boy's father, afraid the ogre would kill him, asked them to take him. When Eggs finally dresses like a normal boy and goes above ground, he finds out the lies being told about the Boxtrolls and helps to make things right.The movie is filled with fine voice actors, and I will mention three. Ben Kingsley is the main bad guy, Archibald Snatcher, who loves cheese but has an allergy and a very bad reaction (swelling of hands, feet, face) when he eats even a tiny bit. Newcomer Isaac Hempstead Wright is the boy, Eggs. And Elle Fanning is the girl Winnie, who starts out as a spoiled rich girl but ends up helping Eggs.This doesn't seem to be an animated movie for kids, in fact it may be hard to state what the target audience is, but it is interesting especially for the great job they did with the animation. However it will never become one of my favorite animated movies.