Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic here with a Slate spoiler special on The Box Trolls, the new stop motion animated film from Portland's Lika Studios.

And I'm excited about my guest today. Joining me from Slate's DC studio is Nell Minnow. Hi, Nell.

Hello. So we've been talking about doing one of these for quite a while. I'm glad you could come in and do this one.

I couldn't have picked a better movie to want to spoil,

so I'm delighted to be here. Yeah, I've been waiting for the right one. So Nell, as a movie critic,

her work can be found at moviemom.com. And Nell, would it be safe to say that you focus on family

films in general? No, it would be more accurate to say that I focus on giving parents an idea of what's in the movie. So it's really that no man's land of the PG-13, where parents need a lot more guidance for me, or even some of the soft hours. So I review pretty much everything except hardcore horror. Right. Well, I was saying before we started taping, this is kind of an interesting test case because the Portland's Lika Studios tends to make. They've only made three animated films so far, Coraline, Paranorman, and now the Bucks Trolls. And their movies, as I was just

talking about in my review yesterday, tend to dip into the world of horror, psychological horror

a little bit, you might say. They're pretty scary for children's movies.

That's true, but that's a grand tradition that goes back to, as Bruttleheim said, about fairy tales. I think that they're very much in line with the kind of scary stuff that we see in, you know, Beauty and the Beast or Little Red Riding Hood. Yeah, it's true. The archetypal material they deal with is definitely familiar from fairy tales, but the way they deal with it, and we'll get into this with the box trolls. It's more true of Paranorman than any of their movies probably.

Yes.

It really does sometimes seem to be quoting actual genre horror filmmaking.

Definitely.

So let's get into the box trolls.

I'm mentioning it as a Lika movie, sort of the way that you talk about Pixar movies, as the latest from Pixar.

Of course, it is also created by individuals. It's co-directed by Anthony Stacky and Graham Anable, who are sort of long time Lika Disciples and written also by, you know, animation writers.

So it has to me the feeling this movie of something that's been put together by a large crew of people that are on the same page about a very complicated project.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to go to visit the studio and do a set visit last spring.

And you got a sense of just the incredible devotion of armies of people from every possible category of human endeavor,

going back to sort of bronze age technology of people with little soldering irons and fishing wire, up to the kind of level of computer algorithms that could get you to the Mars rover.

Wow, that must have been so much fun. So you actually saw them moving the little figurines around?

I got to move a fish myself. What are they made of some kind kind of plasticine the way Wallace and Grommet are?

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