The Boxtrolls 4K 2014 Ultra HD 2160p

Based on the popular Alan Snow book series. Families are different, but what if your relatives are real monsters who hold the whole town in fear. And what if you like a girl from a decent family and you want to introduce her to your relatives...

The Boxtrolls 4K Review
In the dungeons of the dairy-obsessed town of Syrburg live little trolls called "Korobiaks" for wearing cardboard boxes instead of clothes to hide in in case of danger. Korobiaks are charming, cowardly and harmless, but in Syrburg they are considered bloodthirsty monsters, and the town's monster slayer Archibald Hvatson foments prejudice in the hope that when he has finished with the trolls, grateful citizens will make him an aristocrat with the right to wear a magnificent white hat and tasting the rarest cheeses. The latter, however, is fatal for Hvatson, since he is terribly allergic to cheese. But ambition blinds the villain, and he captures one by one Korobyaka, until finally to the aid of monsters comes their pupil - grown in the underground 10-year-old orphan Eggs, who does not even suspect that he is a man, not a troll.

American animation studio Laika is starkly different from its competitors. While Pixar, DreamWorks and others create computer graphics and use bright, "candy" colors, animators Laika work on gothic, dark and eccentric puppet movies, where no one is surprised by a little girl who excitedly talks about rivers of blood, or a little boy who sees ghostly dead people everywhere.

To decorate the film's sets, 55 varieties of props were used, carefully copied from real cheese heads
Laika's new, third creation after "Coraline in Nightmareland" and "ParaNorman" is her grandest and most technically polished canvas yet, and if you love puppet animation, you can already stop reading the review and run for tickets, because you won't see anything better in this style until the studio's next picture comes out. But does "The Monster Family" have any other merit besides its unique, stunning puppet work, leaving all sorts of "Nightmares Before Christmas" far behind?

The dolls' faces were assembled from parts printed on 3D printers, and this gave the animators quick access to an inordinate number of facial expression options. The main character, for example, had 1.4 million potential facial expressions!
Of course there are! First of all, "The Family" is a feast not only on the street of puppet cartoon lovers, but on the street of steam-punk fans as well. If the picture smelled, it would exude not the smell of cheese, but the smell of style - the tape is literally saturated with cartoonish stylizations of Victorian England, complete with bizarre mechanisms and devices (in his spare time korobyaka make all sorts of stuff from picked up during the nightly forays human garbage). What a steamy megarobot that almost destroys Syrburg in the climax! And what puppet costumes, what scenery, what city streets and squares... M-m-m, sumptuous!

The character designs, which corrected a major flaw in "ParaNorman," are also good. The artists of the previous Laika film had gone too far with the artistic ugliness, and you could not look at some of the relatively positive characters of "ParaNorman" without shuddering, even though they were not zombies, but ordinary people. In Monster Family, on the other hand, only the villains (especially Hvatson) are ugly, while Eggs, his girlfriend Winnie, and the other positive characters are attractive enough that you want to put their figures on a shelf and admire them every day.

Finally, the plot of the tape develops thrillingly and without delay, and it successfully combines adventure, jokes, experiences and sudden script twists. At least by the standards of children's animation. Also, in "The Family," none of the positive characters are ripping books out of dead people's hands or doing anything that shouldn't be shown to young children (yes, that's a hint of "ParaNorman" again).

But to call The Family a masterpiece is a bit of a stretch. With all the polished animation, design and script, the film lacks the subtlety and emotionalism of the finale of ParaNorman and some Coraline scenes. Sure, it's a blockbuster, not an art house, but we know that the best American animated films can combine one with the other and create such simultaneously grand, engaging and touching films as "Finding Nemo" and "How to Tame the Dragon." "Monster Family" does not reach that level. But it deserves the audience's attention and respect for what it is.