Something to watch tonight: Friday 23 August

The Boxtrolls (Annable/Stachi, 2014)

Every Friday I have a reg­u­lar on-air chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights, and one of my chal­lenges each week is to find some­thing to watch that is avail­able free of charge. Not every fam­ily has the kind of deep pock­ets that allow you to keep all those sub­scrip­tions online.

This week a charm­ing stop-motion anim­ated fam­ily film leaped out at me and, once I had decided to talk about it tonight, it made sense to recom­mend it you lovely people here too.

Back in 2014 I wasn’t pro­du­cing as many writ­ten reviews as usu­al but we were still put­ting out a weekly pod­cast – Rancho Notorious – from my flat in Newtown, Wellington. That week, my co-host Kailey was report­ing in live from the Vancouver Film Festival and we reviewed the 1980s Swedish teen punks in We Are the Best! and, of course, The Boxtrolls.

Now, thanks to a slightly dubi­ous AI tran­scrip­tion of our con­ver­sa­tion, here are some quotes:

Oh my gosh. I saw this last night and I tweeted you and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the best. That was so good.’

…

The story is about a little fic­tion­al sort of fairytale town that is obsessed by cheese. They are cheese makers and cheese eat­ers. And at the begin­ning of the film, we see the box­trolls (who are trolls who wear boxes as their cloth­ing). They come out at night and go through the garbage, basic­ally, and look for use­ful things that people have left behind. They’re like wombles.

But at the begin­ning of the film, they’re tak­ing a baby away with them. So oh my good­ness, what’s going on here?

And a hero arrives to sup­posedly save the town, Archibald Snatcher, who with his hench­men offers. a little bit like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, offers to rid the town of the box­trolls who may intend to steal and eat all of their chil­dren. He imposes a curfew so that after dark, nobody is allowed out. 

We find out that the baby has grown up, not grown up fully, but has become a little boy known as Eggs, because he thinks that he’s a box­troll and he wears a car­ton, an egg box. And he dis­cov­ers that basic­ally, yeah, he’s not a troll like the rest of them, and that he is in fact a human being, but does­n’t really know how to fit him­self back into soci­ety. I’m not telling this story very well at all, am I?

Yes, tran­scrip­tions of ad lib dis­cus­sions are very embarrassing.

It’s hil­ari­ous. You know, focus on the anim­a­tion, not the voice cast, but the voice cast is so good. So good. They’re so well cast.

The voice cast includes Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette and a bunch of British com­edy luminar­ies like Richard Ayoade.

You’re abso­lutely right in terms of say­ing that it’s for all ages. We took the 11-year-old to it on Sunday after­noon and he was sort of on the edge of his seat all the way through and just laugh­ing because it’s got lots of really gross gags that little boys will appreciate.

It’s got the great char­ac­ter work that adults will appre­ci­ate. And it’s a really good story too and well told. It does­n’t muck about. And this is, I know people say this about films all the time, but you really should stay all the way through the cred­its. Because the best post-credit scene that I’ve seen in a very, very long time, very much worth wait­ing around for.

You can listen to the whole thing here (includ­ing ten-year-old box office reports and film news).

Where to watch The Boxtrolls

Aotearoa: Streaming on TVNZ+ (free with ads)

Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow

Canada, Ireland: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on The Roku Channel (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on ITVx (free with ads)