The Boxtrolls (2014): Movie Boozer Review

When I was a kid, I obsessively watched television like it was my job. One of my favorite shows at the time, Rocko’s Modern Life, featured an episode about corporations and pollution. In it, our lead wallaby Rocko notices his town is involved in a spring cleaning musical (he isn’t involved because he never took notice of the rehearsal fliers.) The residents of O-Town sing all day about the importance of recycling and how corporate greed is a cancer of society promoting pollution. To this day I can sing almost every song featured in that episode and the message it espoused stuck with me over all of these years—which probably explains why I’m a tree hugging, anti-establishment hippie now.

Thanks Rocko, I owe you big time!

The Boxtrolls would like to have this same effect on its young audiences. Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi’s flawless stop-motion animated tale focuses on the town of Cheesebridge and their presumed Boxtroll problem. After a boy is supposedly kidnapped by Boxtrolls, a pot-bellied, gutter punk in search of power, Archibald Snatcher, strikes up a deal with the city council that if he captures all the Boxtrolls, he too can earn the prestigious White Hat worn by the most elite of the city. While Snatcher spreads rumors across town prompting fear of evil, flesh-eating Boxtrolls over the next decade, the Boxtrolls themselves are raising the lost boy underground in a utopia in which the natural builders invent, expand, and live happily. That is until their scavenging above grounds causes their numbers to dwindle, leaving the now 10-year-old boy troll known as Eggs to assimilate himself into the greedy human world to fight for the family of Boxtrolls he loves….

Drink Three Beers, Then Read The Rest of My Review for The Boxtrolls Over at MOVIEBOOZER.COM.