After delivering two wonderfully innovative, immaculately animated features in Coraline and ParaNorman, Laika appears to have another hit on its hands with this fall’s family adventure The Boxtrolls. Like the stop-motion animation studio’s two previous efforts, this movie looks absolutely dazzling, and the story seems promising as well. In the latest trailer, we meet protagonist Eggs (voiced by Game of Thrones‘ Isaac Hempstead-Wright) who is raised by the Boxtrolls and eventually becomes responsible for saving them from ignorant townsfolk.
Though there looks to be plenty of action and excitement in The Boxtrolls, it’s the film’s sense of imagination that comes through most strongly in this trailer. The various contraptions that the Boxtrolls put together from pilfered objects in the town of Cheesebridge look very interesting, and the Boxtrolls themselves manage to be very unique while still tame enough not to frighten younger children in the movie’s target audience.
Elle Fanning lends her voice to the character Winnie, a human girl who discovers Eggs and brings him back to human civilization, sparking the main action of the film. Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette, Jared Harris, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Richard Ayoade also voice characters.
The Boxtrolls opens on September 26th.
LAIKA’s third film is The Boxtrolls, based on Alan Snow’s bestselling novel Here Be Monsters. Introducing audiences to a new breed of family – The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. When the town’s villain, Archibald Snatcher (Academy Award® winner Ben Kingsley), comes up with a plot to get rid of the Boxtrolls, Eggs decides to venture above ground, “into the light,” where he meets and teams up with fabulously feisty Winnie (Elle Fanning). Together, these soft-boiled detectives uncover the hidden connections in Eggs’ past and devise a daring plan to save his unique family.