Animation house Laika Inc. continue to evolve their sense of animated gothic-horror storytelling trending towards towards cuteness. The company started out with perhaps the scariest childrens film made in the past decade with Coraline and then continued handsomely with the quite underrated, if far safer, ParaNorman. Now comes a film that feels more like Monster's Inc. than Pixar's own recent prequel, that is if the trailer has anything to say about it. The 'alternate' parenting lifestyles gleefully shown in the trailer here, proves that Laika is quite serious about putting some brains and allegory into its animated fables.
Based on Alan Snow's "Here Be Monsters!" illustrated childrens book, the film is teaming with excellent voice talent: Simon Pegg, Elle Fanning, Toni Collette, Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Richard Ayoade and Tracy Morgan. And like fellow stop-motion animation studio Aardman, seems to delight in talking about cheese.
The film tells the story of an orphaned boy named Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) who was raised by underground cave-dwelling trash collectors called the Boxtrolls. The Boxtrolls are targeted by an evil exterminator named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and Eggs has to save his friends from that evil exterminator.
Since we are looking at an early teaser of the film don't hold your breath for its release, as that time comes along more than a year from now, in September 2014.