Hi! This is my first time asking a question on Tumblr :)
I've recently been rewatching Laika's films, and I've really enjoyed all of them. I think Coraline and Kubo have the strongest stories, while ParaNorman and Missing Link told well-developed stories. But The Boxtrolls is the one that left me with the biggest "what could have been" feeling.
It seems like the film had so much untapped potential. Looking at the concept art, I noticed a lot of interesting ideas that were cut, like Eggs being more of an inventor (like his father and the Boxtrolls), and even Snatcher having a pet rat, which made him feel more unique, and the list could go on.
Does anyone know why so many of these ideas were changed or removed during development?
Hello! Thank you for reaching out to us! We love messages from fellow fans! First of all, I do love hearing different perspectives and interpretations of these films, even though I personally disagree. Mod Riot and I both think Missing Link had the most wasted potential. As for the reasons behind the changes... it's complicated. This is gonna be a long one. The Boxtrolls (known by the working title Here Be Monsters! throughout much of its production) had the longest pre-production period of any LAIKA film, at least that we know of, and at least before Wildwood. However we do know the most about these earlier versions just from the sheer amount of concept art and storyboards that have surfaced. To understand how this happened, it is crucial to recognize the source material, the novel Here Be Monsters!, is an extremely messy story, and that's putting it lightly. 500 pages and a new character introduced almost every other page. The directors of the film have gone on extensively on how it's impossible to consolidate a story that needlessly complicated, at least not without significantly mangling it. Excluding various cancelled projects, Here Be Monsters! was the first adaptation LAIKA decided to make without Henry Selick's involvement (Drafts for a Coraline film existed before LAIKA was even "founded"). Really the only reason this film exists in the first place is because LAIKA beat out Dreamworks for the film rights by "promising the author, Alan Snow, that LAIKA directors would stay true to his vision and that she’d throw in a pair of Nikes for his son." I almost wish I were making this up. Yea, that didn't happen. The end result is, in essence, a fanfiction. Up to eighteen complete drafts were written during pre-production. About every three drafts, the writing team would start completely from scratch. At one particularly low point CEO Travis Knight had to step in and say “Guys, this is fundamentally broken. It’s not working". Reportedly, the one element that stayed the same across all drafts was the close relationship between the protagonist and the Boxtroll characters, even though the final film seems to focus more on the question of what it means to be a boxtroll. With that being said, there are definitive stories on why certain elements had to be cut, and for very valid reasons. Snatcher's pet rat 'Framley' being one of them. In the novel and in subsequent early drafts of the film, Framley gets "resized" into a giant elephant-sized armored steed, that Snatcher rides around town with much in the same way he rides his giant Mecha-Drill machine.
(Art by Mike Smith) The official Art Book for the film states; "the design teams from all of the major construction departments grappled with the practicalities of building and filming a seven-foot-long, three-foot-tall killer rat. It wasn’t just the construction of the puppet itself that posed the challenge; it was the logistics of placing him in any of the environments and capturing him on camera. It’s a classic example of the scale-related domino effect that can quickly beset a stop-motion film... “Each version of the script kept reducing Framley’s importance. It was getting harder and harder to justify him.” Stacchi agrees. “In the end, he was just taking up space and he wasn’t really that interesting.” To everyone’s relief, the directors finally eliminated Framley entirely." An additional character who stuck around for a while but was eventually cut for not having relevancy in the script, Mr. Gristle. (As in, a character that more closely resembles the Mr. Gristle from the novel. The short and short-spoken Red Hat from the final film was originally named Mr. Crabs. Maybe another reason why this guy was removed.)
(By Alan Cook)
The film directors cite the main reason for cutting this character as "He was stealing all the thunder from Snatcher, he was doing more yelling." (And before anyone asks, yes, Madame Frou Frou is still in the source material as Snatcher's alter ego. it is no more or less questionable to American audiences though it is important to note British entertainment has a long history of crossdressing in entertainment that goes back to the golden age of Shakespeare.) Ultimately it's a matter of how you look at it. To some, the making of The Boxtrolls could demonstrate how the medium of a story could limit its potential (A big reason why Wildwood took so long to officially launch production, Travis Knight was waiting for the studio's technology to be capable of the scale he envisioned for the adaptation.) Or it could be a prime example of fanfiction esque-adaptations. Either way, This film was revolutionary in the world of Stop-Motion for a time, albeit short-lived.
-Rampage
