THE BOXTROLLS

Home Entertainment Exclusive TV Transcript with Travis Knight (Lead Animator, Producer & Laika CEO)

Q: What initially attracted you to The Boxtrolls?

A: There was something about the story that I absolutely loved. It had all these weird creatures and environments. It had this tone that was consistent with the whispers of the great children’s literature from ages ago – Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens – and a great sense of humor like you’d find in a Monty Python sketch. There was something that was just so interesting and wonderful and unique about it that I felt that if we could just crack that story into a film story that we’d have something special. It took nearly ten years to do that. But here we are. We finally have The Boxtrolls, which was inspired by that great story by Alan Snow.

Q: What was the challenge in putting the film together? Why ten years?

A: The pace of making any animated film is glacial. It takes a long time to do these things. The trickiest thing with The Boxtrolls, even outside of the actual execution and the production of the film, was developing the story and those characters. The book is over 500 pages. And to try to distill the essence of that, to remain true to the spirit of that and do that in 90 minutes? There are a lot of things that have to go. You have to start stripping away extraneous stuff, and even things that you love, characters that you love, to really get to the core film story.

Q: Laika is known for pushing the technology envelope. What’s new and innovative that we are seeing here?

A: The great thing about the execution of The Boxtrolls and the way we made the film is that it’s a continued evolution of our process where we integrate stop motion, hand drawn animation, CG and techniques drawn from the theater and the stage. We take all these things and put them in a big swirling gumbo of production techniques that represent a century of filmmaking, and something comes out the other end that is unlike anything else in the world. There is no other studio that has the bag of tricks that we have. We pull from every single method of filmmaking you can imagine.

With The Boxtrolls, what you see is the continued evolution of the style that we started with Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012). So you see these faces that are made with rapid prototype (utilizing 3-D printers) but also now have these weird impressionistic paint jobs on them. The camera which is now much more liberated and kinetic than you typically find in a stop motion film, by bringing in more of a live-action aesthetic. The way we’re making the costumes is also something we’ve never done before, where we’re bringing cutting edge technology into their fabrication. It’s all of those things piled together that make this a real technological marvel.

Q: What was it like seeing the film for the very first time?

A: To see the film come to life is very satisfying, to know that this incredible community of artists, this island of misfit toys, these people who have these really strange passions and talents, have come together in this incredible community and brought this thing to life in such a beautiful and evocative way… It’s deeply, deeply satisfying when you see it all come to life. When you’re sitting and watching it, even as someone who made the film, to really empathize, to really connect with these characters as if they were living breathing things when in fact they’re just an assemblage of steel and silicone, they’re dolls, they’re puppets. All that goes away and you actually connect with them as characters. It’s a pretty magical experience.

Q: What are audiences themselves in store for?

A: The Boxtrolls is unlike anything that anyone has ever seen. It’s really this incredible Dickensian coming-of-age fable. It’s a mashup of Dickens, of Dahl, of Monty Python, with madcap antics and manly feats of derring-do. But in the end, it’s a moving and human story with big ideas and an even bigger heart.

Q: Do you have a favorite cheese?

A: I’m a boring American boy. I like American cheese or Cheez Whiz, if that counts as cheese. I like synthetic cheese! How about that?

Enter the quirky underground world of the mischievous and lovable Boxtrolls with your family this winter, as The Boxtrolls is available to own on 3D Blu-ray and DVD now

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