Heroes come in all shapes and sizes… even rectangles.
When I was at the movies this weekend, I saw a new trailer for The Boxtrolls. Although I was not necessarily inspired to see the film, I thought the focus of the trailer was interesting. The film is created and produced by the same company that released ParaNorman and Coraline. As with these other two films, The Boxtrolls is a stop-action film. Every frame of the movie is hand sculpted and purposefully placed.
Interestingly, instead of focusing on the plot or characters of the film, the trailer explored how the film was made. It begins with an artist sketching and then sculpting a figure. The clips show an elaborate and intricate set with various incarnations of the same character all set to the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” This trailer exploits the process, opposed to the product, which has comparatively little screen time. No lines are spoken, and only a handful of clips from the movie are shown. This trailer seems to be saying, “this movie isn’t actually that interesting, but look at that technique!”
ParaNorman and especially Coraline have been well received, and Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-action film using puppets, is one of my favorite movies, period. In a world of computer graphic imaging and live-action film-making, this production studio is sticking to their guns. The trailer screams, “appreciate us and the effort we put into sculpting this tiny flower!” The craft of animating these films is incredibly beautiful and precise, but in the end CGI moves cleaner and is more consistent. Are we merely celebrating the novelty of stop-motion? Ritualizing the old times when we were supposedly more artistic and individualistic in movie-making? I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the aesthetic of clay and puppet movies. I do, but perhaps we have moved beyond it. It seems that the purpose of The Boxtrolls was to sell a method of creation, rather than the movie product.
About once a year, a new stop-motion movie premieres. We can stop, appreciate it and tell the children that this is how movies used to be and should continue to be made, regardless of how good the movie actually is. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe The Boxtrolls will be the best animated movie of 2014.
So what is the future for this animation style? Will it maintain its ritualistic purpose in our cinema culture? Will it fade into obscurity and become a relic of antiquity? Or will The Boxtrolls inspire a surge of claymation movies?
The Boxtrolls stars the voices of Elle Fanning, Simon Pegg and Ben Kingsley and opens in September. If the film can convince me that it is a good movie all around, then I will gladly go see it, but odds are, I won’t.