All the work and detail that went into The Boxtrolls may never be fully appreciated. Though an early promotion featuring the making of the movie using the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” as a backdrop was presented months ago, that all might be forgotten now that the film is out in theaters. The stop motion animation is almost too good on the big screen for viewers to actually see what they are looking is actually small puppets and hand-crafted sets. As with its predessors, Coraline and ParaNormal, The Boxtrolls is beautiful to look at and one should appreciate all of the work that went in to making the film. Unfortunately, the artwork is only half of the production.

Based on the book “Here Be Monsters” by Alan Snow, Boxtrolls was an attempt to move in a different direction than the two previous films. Where the first two were considered children’s horror stories, Boxtrolls is more of a fairytale. The story itself had great potential, but the end product is a charmless mess.

Boxtrolls are mischievous creatures who dress themselves in cardboard boxes and refer to each other by whatever the box original contained such as “fish,” “sweets” and “wheels.” By day, they sleep peacefully under the streets of the city of Cheesebridge. By night, they roam around the city and take with them anything that isn’t nailed down and sometimes that too. There they create inventions and machines out of the things they find. Sometimes they just destroy light bulbs or what not to enjoy the sound that the broken glass makes. They are neither bad nor good, they just are who they are, but the folks of Cheesebridge are frightened by the creatures. Naturally, stories about the boxtrolls being baby snatchers and eating children, circulates throughout the town and fuels this fear.

The boxtrolls do have one human child in posession though who they raise as one of their own. He is placed in a box that had contained eggs, dubbing him “Eggs.” Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright)  is fed bugs (just like the others) and even after he outgrows his box, he still is unaware that he isn’t really a boxtroll.

Meanwhile above ground, Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) craves to become a “white hat,” a leadership position within the community. Not because he has any interest in civic obligations, but because the white hats spend an enormous amount of time tasting a variety of cheeses instead of creating laws. Apparently, Archibald is lactose intolerant, but that doesn’t seem to faze him. He makes a deal with Lord Portly-Rind (Jared Haris) that if he rids the town of the boxtrolls, that they would give him a white hat and access to the tasting room. For years, Archibald and his crew snatch up boxtrolls and lock them up. When Egg’s mentor, Fish, is snatched up, Eggs goes on a mission to rescue him by going above ground for the first time.

On top Eggs meets Winnie (Elle Fanning), daughter of Lord Portly-Rind, who informs Eggs that he is really a boy and in fact that he just might be the baby that went missing from the town years earlier. In turn, Eggs tells Winnie the truth about the boxtrolls and how they are just misunderstood.

The film does show a glimmer of heart early in during a series of scenes of baby Eggs and Fish playing together. If the film could have kept this tone throughout, the end product may have been better. The makers of Boxtrolls could learn a few lessons from Pixar and Disney. Like ParaNorman, the story is clever, but not cohesive and the characters don’t really get developed. They also don’t seem to value the power of great voice actors to bring the characters to life. The writers mistake jokes as plot points, which doesn’t work at all. In fact, throughout the movie, it seems like the makers try out a number of gags that they think are funny. They’re not.

In addition, a number of storylines fail to make sense. The town of Cheesebridge is poorly run by its leaders, but the citizens don’t seem to care nor do they seem to be affected by it. Winnie’s father ignores her by making cheese-tasting a bigger priority and that attitude never really changes. Finally, Eggs and Winnie’s friendship is an odd one as she isn’t very nice to him, at least not at first.

Though the film tout’s of having a “what really makes a family” message, this seems more like a marketing plan than an actual theme of the movie. A family movie doesn’t need to have a message to be enjoyable but it does need to make sense within that story’s universe. It doesn’t here.