LAIKA, the company behind “Coraline” and “Paranorman,” has a clear purpose in the way they avoid the standard pitfalls of modern family entertainment. They don’t
talk down to kids. They don’t worry about scaring their young viewers. They
spark imaginations. And they’re about to do it again this week with their loose
adaptation of Alan Snow’s “Here Be Monsters,” now called “The Boxtrolls.” In
their gorgeously detailed stop-motion style, directors Graham Annable and
Anthony Stacchi bring to life a world of non-verbal Boxtrolls, who can
communicate with only one human, a boy named Eggs. When Eggs realizes that the
people above the land of the Boxtrolls want them dead, he gets caught in a war
of class, pride and cheese. With great voice work by Ben Kingsley, Jared
Harris, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, Elle Fanning and more, “The Boxtrolls”
continues the track record of LAIKA to offer something that’s more than the
loud noises and bright colors that seem to be the operating aesthetic for most
family films. Annable and Stacchi sat down with us last month to talk about
their latest creative effort, and revealed the kind of influences you don’t
usually see in 3D entertainment from Terry Gilliam to Russian animation to Jean-Pierre Jeunet to
Merchant/Ivory.

When I look at “Coraline,” “Paranorman” and this film, there’s
a certain visual continuity. You can tell they’re all from the same company and
yet they’re also distinct. How much of that is purposeful, or just by virtue of
who you’re working with, and how do you make a film that stands alone at the
same time?

ANTHONY STACCHI (AS): Well, they’re distinct in part just by having a different
director each time. Travis is overseeing them all and the studio is overseeing
them all. Every studio has a culture. In that line, in that evolution, you can
see…Henry made certain choices on “Coraline”—the austereness, the theatrical
feeling sets, the straight lines, the symmetry. Those choices take it in a
certain direction. Chris and Sam had a very distinct look where they wanted a
lot of curves and the characters’ faces are very asymmetrical. Big eyes.
Chunky. Very 2-D animation inspired. All of that stuff adds to it. And then,
technologically, we now have more ability. The crew just knowing
better what they’re doing has allowed the faces to get so much more complex.
Crawling. Colors that you couldn’t do on “Coraline” that had to be hand-painted.
“Paranorman” got better.

GRAHAM ANNABLE (GA): At this stage, the third film out, we have tried to be
distinct artistically and filmically, but we have kept what we refer to as The
Band—this incredible core of really talented people—together for three
stop-motion films. That’s never really happened before. Usually, a studio makes
a stop-motion movie and then everyone disbands. That chemistry has to be
recreated in a different manner somewhere else. We’ve done three films in a row
with the same core of people and that can’t help but create a through line.

AS: [Producer] Travis [Knight] pushes us. And they know there’s going to be
another 18 months of pre-production and production and they don’t want to do it
the same way. People are trying to figure out a new and better way to do it. In
this film, part of the story was this aristocratic society and then the
boxtrolls who feed off that society. So there was going to be this feeling of
excess—all these costumes and textures. So everybody grabbed on to that and ran
with it and each tried to out-do each other.

The background detail is remarkable. Talk a little bit about
the importance of having a more complete setting for this one with rooms and
costumes and production design that’s as detailed as what’s in the foreground.

AS: The story sort of demanded it. You have a hierarchical
world. You wanted Snatcher’s world at the bottom of the city to sort of feel
like it belonged there. To also feel empty. Sort of a Victorian mancave. You
can’t look at Alan’s illustration style in the book and say it totally inspired
the movie but you can sort of look at the grittiness of the lines—the dirty,
sooty, Victorian London setting of the story—and see it definitely inspired us.
You know, we loved “Oliver Twist,” “The Third Man”…I used to pitch it as like “The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen”—you know, the period detail that Terry Gilliam
loves in his movies.

And a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

GA: Yeah, yeah. When I came on board, I kept telling Tony, “This
is great! We’re gonna make ‘Delicatessen’ for kids! This is amazing!”

You literally DO at one point with the musical saw.

GA: (Laughs). Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t help but bring that kind
of stuff into the world. To me, it was so exciting to get to make to a film
that looked this lush and this rich. We were allowed to put us much detail as
we could into the frame because the setting demanded it; required it. And yet,
it also presented a heck of a challenge. Compositionally, we were always like, “This
all looks amazing, but we kind of need to know where to look.”

AS: Can we direct the eye? It’s a tribute to the whole camera crew, and using the 3D to direct the eye. People go “Oh, you
guys make horror movies for kids,” and we go, “No, we make Merchant/Ivory
movies for kids.” We make “Barry Lyndon with Monsters.”

How do the visuals change or do they when the film is cast?
Is it mere coincidence that Jared Harris’ character looks like Jared Harris?

AS: It’s funny because Portley-Rind was designed before we got
Jared Harris but we did sort of go through a redesign phase. And we were
listening to Jared’s voice in that phase but we never look at artwork as trying
to do a portrait of him.

But do the visuals change when you have voices behind them?

AS: We had all the silhouettes of the characters, so it kind
of guides who you go looking for. It fuels it. Trout’s a big man, and so’s Nick
Frost. You do want to feel like the voice resonates in the body of the actor
the same way it would in the character. It’s funny that it sometimes happens
that you have a character…Tracy Morgan looks nothing like his character but
they go together. Richard Ayoade? Looks a little like Pickles. It works both
ways.

Snatcher doesn’t really look like Ben Kingsley but it fits.

AS: No. He uses his voice like an instrument. When he showed
up for the recording session, he had read the script and seen the character
designs, and he talked a lot about Snatcher’s belly. He felt that he was a man
who really enjoyed life—he had eaten a lot of cheese, drunk a lot of wine. He
was comfortable with his awkward physique, and so he wanted to record reclining
in a chair. He felt like his voice would be coming out of his diaphragm in the
right way. First day, he needed a chair. I had never heard of anybody asking
for that before. Most people want to stand. And you ask for them to stand
because, if they’re sitting down, they feel differently. But I wasn’t going to
tell Don Logan he couldn’t record leaning back in a chair.

Do you ever worry that some of Snatcher’s plans and devices
are going too far for their target audience? Do you have conservations about
how scary is too scary?

AS: Travis’ philosophy is that films need to have a dynamic
range.

GA: The only way to have the light is to have the darkness,
to really feel that full range. To have a full experience with how we connect
with a movie. Right from the start, we wanted to make something that was
honestly a little bigger and a little brighter than what we had done before.
Stop-motion: Everyone does tend to think of “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James
and the Giant Peach,” “The Corpse Bride.” It gears to darker material. We
wanted, as a studio, to challenge ourselves and make a comedy-adventure, and
see where we can take it with this medium. Because of what us as artists are
interested, there are dark moments in this film, but having the bright, joyous
moments to contrast with it is what we feel is worthwhile. You want to feel
those big highs and low lows. We’re not Pixar, we’re not Dreamworks, we don’t
have the mega-budgets of those studios; that frees us up to go into territory
that some of the bigger studios don’t like to get into because they’re
terrified of marginalizing or alienating. We get to tell the stories we want to
tell.

OK, then how would this film have been different with a
mega-budget? How would it look as a Pixar production?

AS: It was considered to be done at Dreamworks. They looked
at the book. But things had changed by the time we ended up doing it. They
thought it was too dark. It’s funny, their favorite characters were The
Cabbageheads, these great characters in the book who were in our draft for a
long time but fell out of the movie when we focused on Eggs and the Boxtrolls.
It was too many underworld communities.

There are other communities in the book?

GA: Oh yes. The book is endlessly inventive.

AS: It’s Dickensian. You can’t turn around without bumping
into a new character, a new plot, a new setting. It’s really….we’re inspired by
it and it’s an adaptation of it but it’s really different. Winnie and the
Portly-Rinds aren’t in the book. We needed to have an above-ground world in all
its prejudices and obsessions, so we created a family and one character in
Winnie that Eggs could meet.

Back to a beat earlier. If you have twice the budget, how is
this different and did having a low budget help you to find new creative ways
to get it done?

AS: I never felt stymied like it wasn’t enough. Stop-motion
requires what it requires. We had 30 animators and we had all the great ones we
could. We were lucky that we were the only stop-motion movie filming at the
time. We couldn’t have hired more with more money. It wouldn’t have helped us
there. And we kind of got to do everything we wanted to do. You make the story
work. You find how to do it with the means you have. We benefit from the studio
having done two previous films. Their CG and stop-motion departments are melded
together.

What would this film have been like 10 years ago? Could it
have existed?

GA: Not on this scale. Alan had realized this crazy, huge
world. We knew we could create a stop-motion film that felt a lot bigger than
stop-motion usually does. While it’s part of its inherent charm, you kind of
feel trapped on a small set in a lot of stop-motion. They ARE small sets.

AS: You can feel like you’re on a tabletop. We didn’t want
that. We wanted at every opportunity to be able to see to the horizon. To treat
the stop-motion footage like live-action footage. Rather than have the naïve conceit
of “smoke is made of cotton” and “rain is made of gelatin,” we wanted realistic
effects. You never get thrown out of the movie. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is
great but it pushed that to a degree where you always knew you were looking at
a little doll.

A diorama. But that was intentional.

AS: Oh, yeah, yeah. And it was great. It’s been done great. I
think “Coraline” does it a bit too. It was part of their appeal. They embraced
the limitations of it, but we really wanted to blow it open.

What art or filmmakers inspired this other than Jeunet?

AS: From the very beginning, I loved the little boy in “Kes.”
There’s something about the quality of that boy and that simple human story. He
inspired Eggs’ design. David Lean’s “Oliver Twist.” I love the films of this
Russian animator named Yuriy Norshteyn; he made this film called “Tale of
Tales.” There’s a lot of Russian in there. There are a lot of characters acting
in pantomime. I loved the idea of having these boxtrolls who you can’t
understand and so their performance comes through their expressions.

GA: That’s what gravitated me to the project. At a certain
point during the “Paranorman” schedule, I got a chance to do some work on this
project, and he handed me a sequence with no dialogue—just the boxtrolls
finding a little baby in the trash. I got to storyboard a whole sequence where
nobody said anything. I guess the sensibility I brought to that was what
triggered it for Tony and Travis as this is the kind of movie we want to make
here.

Source:: http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/barry-lyndon-with-monsters-the-directors-of-the-boxtrolls