Review: The Boxtrolls

City Paper grade: B-

The waxy blue tinkerers at the heart of the latest movie from Laika are adept at turning cast-off bits of metal into ingenious contraptions, but the spare parts that make up The Boxtrolls don’t mesh nearly as smoothly. The elements are (mostly) in place — the stop-motion animation is deft and embellished with manic detail; the voice performances, from Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Elle Fanning and Isaac Hempstead-Wright, are solid; the story, from Alan Snow’s novel Here Be Monsters!, hits the requisite beats — but the movie springs only fitfully to life: It’s like a clockwork toy that no one bothered to wind. As Archibald Snatcher, an aspirant exterminator who cooks up a fictitious threat from the underground-dwelling Boxtrolls to ease his transition into the aristocracy, Kingsley has the bearing of a Dickensian scrounger and the rhetorical skill of Dick Cheney. The Brie-chomping toffs of Cheesebridge make the perfect marks for his con, but wee redhead Winnie Portley-Rind (Fanning) smells something amiss, especially when the purportedly abducted child that Snatcher uses to stoke the town’s fears turns up unharmed in the Boxtrolls’ midst. There’s plenty here for a worthwhile story, but directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi don’t invest the material with the fond dottiness of Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit stories or the gleeful grotesquerie of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen — obvious reference points that The Boxtrolls emulates but fails to match. Frame by frame, it’s a pleasure to look at at, but run them all together and it’s still inert.