The latest film from LAIKA, the studio that brought you the celebrated stop-motion animated movies Coraline and ParaNorman, opens in theaters this weekend. It’s an adaptation of the book Here There Be Monsters by Alan Snow called The Boxtrolls, and it stars Isaac Hempstead-Wright as a young boy adopted by subterranean trolls who wear boxes for clothing. A villain named Archibald Snatcher (Sir Ben Kingsley) vows to exterminate all the Boxtrolls in exchange for a place in polite society, and a young girl named Winifred (Elle Fanning) helps Eggs save the day and also waxes rhapsodic about cannibalism and monsters.
It’s an… eccentric film, and it’s directed by Anthony Stacchi (Open Season) and Graham Annable (Bone: Out from Boneville). I got them together to discuss their co-directing duties on The Boxtrolls, Sir Ben Kingsley’s mysterious vocal impersonation, transvestitism, the development of a strong and original heroine and the genesis of the film’s worst – read: best – pun.
Related: Sir Ben Kingsley on ‘The Boxtrolls’ (Exclusive Video)
CraveOnline: I’m curious how you guys came together. Often when you see a co-directing team, they have a long resumé of credits together. And here I imagine it was like, “We want this to be kinda like Open Season, and also kinda like Bone!”
Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi: [Laughs.]
How did it come together?
Anthony Stacchi: It’s weird. I had been working in LA. I didn’t work at LAIKA prior to this. And when I went up to visit, Travis [Knight, producer] gave me Here Be Monsters to read. We knew early on that that core story we loved, about the boy being raised underground by Boxtrolls, was what we were going to have to boil this enormous book down to. We went through different levels of how much did the Boxtrolls speak, how much didn’t they speak, and then we really wanted to keep them pantomime. So they had little emotive noises so you could tell their emotions, but they didn’t have recognizable words, or not too many recognizable words. So early I’d seen Graham’s work in the story department there, and I definitely wanted him to work with us as the head of story just because he knew everybody and I was new to the company. And then early on I’d seen Graham’s work, his comic book work and his personal films, and in those nobody talks!
Graham Annable: Yeah, all the animated shorts. I’d done a bunch of animated shorts that I’d put up on YouTube, and of course I’d just do them on my own. I don’t bring in actors, I don’t have any voices to really record, so I’ve always worked without dialogue. And when I was in the middle of storyboarding on Paranorman I got an opportunity to work with Tony for a little bit, and he handed me this sequence that was just all about Shoe and Fish, the two little Boxtrolls, finding a baby in the trash, and there’s not a single line of dialogue in it. It all needed to get communicated through gestures and expressions. So for me it was like the dream job. It was exactly the right kind of challenge. It was stuff I was comfortable doing and wanted to do and explore in film, so yeah, it worked out. That sequence kind of became the thing that everybody, Tony and CO Travis rallied around. This is the movie we want to make with The Boxtrolls. The sensibilities just kind of synched up between the two of us, and yeah. I thought I was going to be just boarding The Boxtrolls and ended up sitting beside this guy, co-directing it.
Is that how you divvied it up? You handled all the pantomime stuff, and you did… other stuff?
Anthony Stacchi: Well, production divvies you up, really. When we’re together doing the story reel, and designing the movie, that we can do together because the production pressures aren’t so bad then. You can do everything together, and the story reels are the blueprint for the whole movie. So if you agree on everything there, a huge percentage of you guys are on the same note. And then, once you hit production and stages full of animators, and you’re really on a tight schedule, then we divided and split up the animation duties and the sequence duties. The first thing in the morning we’d talk about what sequence are you on, 2300, Malcolm’s animating that, this shot, that’s an important shot there, oh yeah I remember that shot. We discuss all that stuff and then we go into separate editing rooms and work kind of separate for the rest of the day and come back at lunchtime, have these crossover meetings where we compare. At that point it really helps to have two [directors]. And then occasionally I would leave to record Sir Ben [Kingsley] in London for four or five days, and Graham would stay and make sure the job kept going.
Tell me about Sir Ben Kingsley. I heard he liked to recline.
Anthony Stacchi: Just for the Snatcher character, which is the opposite of anything you would ever do. When you record you ask that people stand up. If they want to sit, you’re kind of okay but their chest gets compressed and they sound differently. It’s much more resonant if they stand up.
But if Sir Ben Kingsley wants to do it, Sir Ben Kingsley does whatever he wants.
Anthony Stacchi: That’s right. That’s exactly right. [Laughs.]
Graham Annable: You let him do whatever he needs to do. [Laughs.]
Anthony Stacchi: He had this concept of the character, that he wanted him to come out of his…
Graham Annable: He saw that design. Tony had brought the character designs of course to him, and he saw that belly that had been drawn into the character and decided early on that he was going to have the voice come from that belly and so…
Anthony Stacchi: He even said when he had only read the script and hadn’t seen any of the art that he had somebody in mind, and he would never tell us who it was, who sounded a lot like Snatcher.
Was it Michael Gambon?
Graham Annable: No…
That’s who I was thinking did the voice for a minute.
Anthony Stacchi: It’s funny, somebody else mentioned that. No, it was somebody he knows personally and he doesn’t want to mention it because them to know that they’re the basis for Snatcher.
Graham Annable: [Laughs.]
Anthony Stacchi: But he was great. Then he would give you three takes on each line, and I had various takes on it…
But no more than three. Ever!
Anthony Stacchi: No, he would do more, but he wanted to do those first three the way he had gone over the pages and conceived them, and then out of that kind of emerged this character, all these other sides to Snatcher. You ended up having of empathy for him, which was surprising to us.
I was curious about how Snatcher fits into the film’s themes. A lot of it is about nature vs. nurture. Can you change who you are inside? And it’s very curious to have that theme, and also a villain who is a transvestite.
Anthony Stacchi: You know it’s funny. I mean, he is a transvestite, and part of that… which is funny because people said, “When he’s a transvestite he’s more accepted than when he’s a man.”
Graham Annable: That’s true!
Anthony Stacchi: I said yeah, but that’s just a means towards his goal of convincing the town. Because they would never listen to Snatcher, but they would listen to Madame Frou Frou. So he does that because it’s part of his evil plot, which is more interesting because Eggs goes through a transformation. He removes his box, which is tantamount to changing his body, to become something and figure out who he is. And Snatcher’s forcing his body to become more aristocratic, to the point where it’s actually rejecting cheese. So we like how they mirrored each other, these two characters in search of fitting in.
That’s interesting. The one thing that confused me about Snatcher’s cross-dressing, is he does at one point say his middle name is Penelope. So I thought he may have been raised to dress like a woman.
Anthony Stacchi: [Laughs.] That’s really clever. I never thought of that. We just thought Penelope was a funny name. In the midst of this coronation ceremony, and he does it fearlessly, he says it. And boarded around it. Jared Harris when he recorded it, he says, “Penel… Really? Penelope, really?”
Graham Annable: [Laughs.]
Anthony Stacchi: It was really funny! But then we cut it in there and it just seemed like we were beating it over the head.
It’s the end of the movie, you can’t digress too much.
Anthony Stacchi: Yeah.
Winifred is one of my favorite characters in a while.
Graham Annable: Oh, I’m glad to hear that.
She reminds me, not in a literal way but just in terms of how I’d never seen her character before, of Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice.
Anthony Stacchi: Yes.
She’s spunky…
Anthony Stacchi: Little firecracker, yup.
But also kind of evil, you know?
Anthony Stacchi: Yes!
Graham Annable: [Laughs.]
You feel like she’s not inherently going to become a villain, but she’d apply to the classes.
Anthony Stacchi: Exactly. Had she not met Eggs she’d be on track to be a real piece of work. We love that you meet a girl who doesn’t get enough attention [from] her father, and she meets a boy who has no father, whose father was murdered. So you wanted to get these dynamic pairings and then, yeah, we went back and forth. There was a lot of people in [the story department] at the studio who said she’s unlikable, she goes too far. And we would talk to Elle [Fanning], we talked a lot about that. She can’t be shrill, you have to understand why she is that way. And then Jared Harris would say, “I’m a really awful father! I’m the villain of this movie! I’m a terrible father.” I said, “No, no, you’re still redeemable. You’re not the villain.” But you know, that’s kind of LAIKA’s thing. We definitely think-feel, since we’re a small, independent animation house, we keep our budgets low, we don’t have to go down the middle of the road and appeal to anybody. We can push things a little further.
Another thing I like about LAIKA is they don’t go for the obvious, clean character designs. Winifred is not the typical hero girl. She’s got a little meat on her bones. That in and of itself makes her so much more interesting to me, just to look at. Can you tell me about whether there was any hesitance to that? Or was it easy, that’s just what she looked like?
Anthony Stacchi: No, we went back and forth. All the characters were caricatured in a slightly more cartoony way at one point and then Travis was saying, “These designs don’t scare me. They’re not pushing our department in a way that we’re improving these character designs.” So concept of the characters didn’t change but in some ways the level of realism to them, and the amount of texture on them [did change]. Winnie was always going to be a little bit heavier…
Graham Annable: Yeah, and it’s funny too. Our process for the character design on this film went a different route than it typically does. Usually with most animated features we’ve done, the character design gets done first. That’s the thing that solidifies first and then the world and everything else begins to get designed around that. But on The Boxtrolls…
Anthony Stacchi: We knew the way we wanted the world to look very early on. Character designs were much more…
Graham Annable: And we had Michel Breton, who is this French-Canadian, amazing artist. He had worked on Coraline, The Triplets of Belleville, we knew what he could bring to the table. He realized the world so clearly, distinctly early on that the sets and the whole world of Cheesebridge solidified first, and then it was like this bizarre puzzle to figure out characters designs that were going to work within that. We kind of had to map our characters to the world, as opposed to world to the characters.
That’s weird.
Graham Annable: It was strange, yeah. It presented different problems and different things to try to fit those together.
Anthony Stacchi: But Travis, he definitely embraced the idea that Winnie was not going to be a skinny little princess character from the beginning.
Before I go, I just want to say that Curdswhey? “Milk turns into it…?”
Anthony Stacchi: [Laughs.] Are you with us on that one?!
I AM TOTALLY WITH YOU. Bless you for that AWFUL pun.
Anthony Stacchi: That’s great, because Adam Pava, who was writing with us at that time, he’s the… What’s his e-mail?
Graham Annable: “Pundog.”
Anthony Stacchi: Pundog! So you know that’s where it came from. When we put it in there we were looking at Travis, and when he laughed we thought, “This is never going to survive.”
Graham Annable: We thought “this will never survive.”
Anthony Stacchi: There’s a lot of people going, “You gotta take that out…”
Graham Annable: Iteration after iteration, it stayed, it stayed, and it made it.
Anthony Stacchi: There’s going to be people from the company who go to our screening and go, “Sigh… it’s still in there.”
I tried to get a slow clap going at my screening. It didn’t work out.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
