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“The Boxtrolls Is the Cutest Kiddie Cartoon Ever Made About Hitler”

That’s the title of an LA Weekly article. And it’s not wrong, at least in an allegorical sense, though it’s unclear as to whether or not The Boxtrolls (2014) filmmakers were intentionally going for a specific Hitler reference or just playing off the theme of an “evil rise to power.”

In a nutshell, the idea of the film is that the Boxtrolls are a race of little critters that live underground and wear boxes for clothes. Above ground, an aristocracy known as the White Hats oversees the town of Cheesebridge, where everyone wishes they were a White Hat so they could sit around eating cheese all day. This is true for no one more so than Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), a lower-class Red Hat who will do anything to become part of the White Hat cheese club, despite a hideous cheese allergy that can kill him. The film’s plot is focused on Snatcher capturing and imprisoning the innocent Boxtrolls. If he kills them all, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), the leader of the White Hats, will bestow one of the hats of entitlement upon Snatcher. Everyone in town thinks the Boxtrolls are vicious, murderous little monsters who steal children and tear people’s flesh apart, and live among mountains of bones and rivers of blood… but they’re really just cute little blobs who like to build steampunk gadgets and play with bugs.

So it’s not difficult to see the Hitler similarity. The plot is predicated on a blood libel. And it’s ironic that Schindler’s List star Ben Kingsley voices the character responsible for all the Hitler-esque capturing, enslaving, and murdering.

Amy Nicholson for LA Times elaborates:

“This is a story of propaganda, genocide, suppression, servitude and apathy. In short, it’s the story of the Jewish nightmare of the 1930s, and of dozens of other terrible trials that have happened throughout the ages. The arc is always the same. An ambitious climber scapegoats a minority group for his own benefit, and the masses don’t disagree. They’re either focused on their own wealth, like Portley-Rind’s heaping stacks of brie and cheddar, or fooled by false claims. Here, a self-serving stage actress (also Kingsley) puts on a nasty play about how the Boxtrolls kidnap and kill children, and Annable and Stacchi [the film’s directors] cut to the crowd roaring for vengeance. It’s like outtakes from a Leni Riefenstahl film. And unlike the rest of the film, the so-called crime is no metaphor — blood libel accusations have been leveled against the Jews for more than 1,000 years in Europe, and we saw shades of them again this summer in Israel, on both sides of the struggle. What’s smart about The Boxtrolls is that even the brightest townspeople have been suckered into siding with the wrong side.”

That is true too. The article goes on to point out that Winnie (Elle Fanning), the headstrong daughter of Lord Portley-Rind, ends up in the Boxtroll labyrinth thanks to the human who lives among them, Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright). When Eggs reveals to Winnie the true nature of the Boxtrolls, she’s legitimately disappointed. “I was promised mountains of bones!” she shouts. And the entire village of Cheesebridge is in support of Snatcher’s quest to destroy the Boxtroll populus. At one point they think he’s succeeded, and they gather in the town square to cheer in unison for his receipt of a White Hat.

LA Times again: “The film asks children to parse not just good versus evil but the gray area of good people who do evil — and, grayer still, the good people who see evil and do nothing about it. Bleakest of all: the victims who refuse to fight back.”

Lena Houst of Film Misery continues, “This movie may just as easily be Snatcher’s story, since it’s his character’s tragic, perverted and thoroughly disgusting arc that builds most of the film’s critique of class culture and its destructive implications. He’s somebody who’ll already scapegoat an entire innocent race of citizens in order to ascend the ranks.”

That’s extra valid, since Snatcher doesn’t just capture and kill the Boxtrolls. He first puts them into a work camp he’s created in the basement of a warehouse, where they engineer a giant, walking, steampunk Transformer he eventually uses to stomp town square. It’s not until they have completed his work that he decides to kill them.

Though the Hitler/Holocaust undertones of The Boxtrolls are likely to fly right over the heads of its younger viewers, it at least succeeds in doing what the filmmakers may have been more directly trying to achieve: it introduces them to dark realities about the world. There are things that happen in society that make no sense in the face of humanity. There are always groups that are tormented by others. And there are always people disregarding everything to rise up in rank, even if it destroys them.