It was nice, I wouldn’t mind watching it again but I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Boxtrolls are basically small trolls that cover themselves up with boxes. A timid race, they like to build things and they steal little objects from the city, things that men have thrown away. For some reason, here “cheese” is what distinguishes the rich, I mean that our ‘let’s drink champagne’ here becomes ‘let’s taste some cheese’.
It starts saying that Boxtrolls are kidnapping babies, and therefore are a threat to people. A sinister man, Snatcher, blackmails Lord Portley-Rind to get a huge reward after he’ll have exterminated all Boxtrolls to keep all children, including the lord’s daughter, safe.
When we see the boxtrolls coming out at night to steal things, they don’t seem threatening at all, but the exterminator keeps catching more and more of them. Those who manage to escape, retreat to their world below, where we see the supposedly-kidnapped baby. A troll brings him gifts, calls him Eggs, they all eat insects, and the baby grows up as one of them, cared for and loved.
When he’s a boy, he is seen at night by Winnie, Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter, but when she tries to tell others nobody listens to her. All her father seems to care about is his White Hat, a prestigious symbol of his status. There are not many boxtrolls left anymore, most of them have been captured by Snatcher, but when Fish is taken, the trolls that Eggs considers to be his father, he goes out during the day to find him. He hears the story of how ten years ago the boxtrolls took a baby and that’s why now humans fear and hate them, and lock doors at night.
Snatcher likes to eat cheese to emulate the rich people in town, but he’s extremely allergic to it, and the three men with him must always save him before it’s too late. Pickles and Gristle don’t seem evil like Snatcher, they think they’re doing the good and right thing actually, but the third man Trout seems to be enjoying his work a bit too much, I say.
Eggs finds out that all the boxtrolls are still alive, kept as slaves working for Snatcher. Winnie followed Eggs, so she sees everything and says that she’ll tell her father all about it, so of course they take her prisoner.
Eggs saves her and they all escape to the troll-land below. Only now he learns that he’s a boy and not a troll... but he was not stolen. He was given to Fish by a nice man who liked trolls because he was a builder too. When Snatcher killed him and tried to take the baby, he gave his son to Fish and shouted to run, so they took him away and raised him.
Now Eggs asks Winnie’s help, they plan to explain everything to her father. She makes proper boy-clothes for him and takes him home, but her dad never listens. Eggs goes back down below, but Snatcher finds them even there; Eggs shouts for them to run, to do something, but they simply hide, meaning they stop where they are and hide inside their box... so Snatcher catches them all.
We see that the boy’s birth-father is still alive, he’s been a prisoner for ten years, hanging upside-down, but he’s alive. Snatcher doesn’t need them anymore, and intends to kill all boxtrolls. The boy’s father tries to help him, and Eggs makes a good speech but it’s sad when it seems not to be working, because the boxes don’t move. Eggs thinks they’re still ‘hiding’, so when all boxes are crashed he thinks that they all died, and when his father laughs he thinks he’s gone mad after all those years hanging upside down...
Snatcher tells everyone that all boxtrolls have been exterminated, and therefore there’s no more curfew. Now he wants his white hat as promised, and he wants Lord Portley-Rind’s hat!
When Snatcher tries to kill Eggs publicly, Winnie convinces Pickles and Gristle to spare him.
Trout won’t stop though, but here we see that the trolls are indeed not dead, they escaped out of their boxes without being seen by anyone but the boy’s father. That’s why the man laughed.
The trolls, with Eggs and Winnie’s help, destroy Snatcher’s machine, but then he captures Winnie to force the lord to give up his hat for her. He loves her after all, and so he yields to Snatcher.
Finally with the white hat, Snatcher wants to take his place into the cheese-tasting-room, to taste cheese as is the ritual among lords, and Eggs makes a speech to convince him that he doesn’t need white hats and cheese to change who he is, that things don’t make who you are, only you can make you, but in Snatcher’s mind that’s what he’s doing, what he is, he has made himself and thinks that’s who he is, so he eats cheese and his face starts growing in an unnatural, sick way, until he explodes.
This is their happy ending, and now everyone can live happily, people and trolls together, no more hiding, no more curfew, no more fear on both sides.
During the ending credits there’s a son in Italian that names a lot of cheeses saying that they’re the best thing in the world - it can’t name them all but it names quite a few.
ITA Boxtrolls - le scatole magiche
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