Film Review - The Boxtrolls (2014)

The Boxtrolls is about a group of creatures called the Boxtrolls who prowl the streets at night and abduct a baby boy who grows up with them and becomes known only as Eggs after a box of Eggs but an evil man named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) is determined to find them and destroy them.

2014 has set a high watermark in terms of animated films with both the Lego Movie and How to Train your Dragon 2 proving to be strong family films with fun to be had for both young and old audience members which is why it saddens me to say that this one does not measure up, don't get me wrong it is far from terrible and there is fun to be had but there were a couple of reasons I feel this way:

- The first is that unlike the studios previous film Paranorman, this movie lacks a strong beating heart at its centre and tends at times to divide its focus between the Eggs and the Boxtroll creatures and as a result I began to not really care all that much about the films climax.

- The second is that the story here is also very predictable and by that I mean that I began to predict what was going to happen in the climax of the film and again as a result of this I didn't really care about how it all played out which ties it back to the lack of heart that the film has.

But as I said this is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination as the film has some great animation (it was animated with stop motion) and some of the fast motion is very good here as well especially during some of the running and sliding scenes but I would also say that this film might be a little too scary for under 5 or 6 year old children so I would think twice before taking them to it.

So all in all the Boxtrolls is nicely animated and has some good motion but I found the story predictable and lacking in heart, 2 and a half out of 5.