Pun Salad

A little stop-motion animation gem.

Set in the fantasy town of Cheesebridge, which has an interesting social structure: the cheese-obsessed humans live aboveground, and everything is run by the "white hats". At night, the Boxtrolls emerge from their underground lair while the humans cower in their homes.

But one fateful night, seemingly, the Boxtrolls do something unusual: the infant Trubshaw is abducted, daddy Trubshaw disappears. The town exterminator, red-hatted Archibald Snatcher, bullies the mayor, Lord Portley-Rind, into authorizing an extermination campaign against the underground monsters; in exchange, Snatcher will be granted a white hat and allowed entry into the exclusive cheese-tasting room in the Portley-Rind mansion.

As it turns out, the Boxtrolls are ugly, but they're so ugly they're cute (as typical with movies like these). And they have a certain amount of engineering wizardry, stealing junk from Cheesebridge at night, transforming their underground digs into a Rube Goldbergian paradise.

And their abduction of the Trubshaw babe is also a bad rap. They adopt him as one of their own, and eventually he grows up to (slight spoiler here) save the day against the evil Snatcher, with the help of Lord Portley-Rind's slightly-spoiled daughter Winnie.

It's wonderfully creative, very funny in spots. Clearly a labor of love for the filmmakers.

Interestingly, I just read an article in Wired where Steven Spielberg pronounced stop-motion as "extinct" after viewing the CGI dinosaur effects for the first Jurassic Park. He said that over twenty years ago. Nevertheless, the technique keeps ticking along, and it's difficult to imagine that this movie would be quite as wonderful without it.