In this episode we discussed 'Paranorman' and 'The Boxtrolls'.

If you have any suggestions as to what Adam's 'missed king of the hill connection is', our twitter handle is @stillscaredpod, and you can email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

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Transcript

Ren: Hello, and welcome to ’Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror’ a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and tv. I’m Ren Wednesday and with my co-host Adam Whybray today we’ll be talking about two films - Paranorman and The Boxtrolls. And I just wanted to add a quick warning that in the latter half of the episode we do talk about some transmisogynist/transphobic tropes that come up. I will say when we get there in case you would rather not listen to that. Enjoy!

• Theme tune plays -

Ren: So we’re going to be talking about Paranorman, and to a lesser extent Boxtrolls.

Adam: Yeah, Paranorman is more of a horror film.

Ren: Yes, and I suggested that we talk about Paranorman, despite not liking it very much.

Adam: I’m glad we got that out of the way early!

Ren: - Just to get that out of the way right at the start! It’s made by the studio Laika, so it’s a stop-motion animation film and made by the same studio that did Coraline -

Adam: - and we both love Coraline

Ren: A children’s horror classic that we will undoubtedly talk about at some point. So it had a lot to live up to going into it, and in my opinion it doesn’t live up to it. So, the main character is Norman who is an eleven year-old boy who lives in a small Massachusetts town that is part of the witch trials industry.

Adam: And he’s voiced by Kodi Smitt-Mcphee, which is a great name, I just want to say.

Ren: So he can see and speak to the dead, and it’s the 300th anniversary of a witch’s execution in this town and Norman finds out that the story of the witch cursing her sentencers is true, and they are going to raise from the dead and he needs to stop them. That’s essentially the plot.

So is it scary? Adam, what do yo think?

Adam: I mean, it certainly would have scared me as a kid, but i’ve said previously I was a very sensitive child, so that’s not saying much admittedly. I think what’s interesting about it is that the scariness doesn’t really come from the expected sources. So the zombie-like figures, the characters who are raised from the dead, are quite laconic at best.

Zombies are traditionally slow and shambling, but these are particularly lacklustre zombies and I think even early on it’s quite obvious that they’re not a major threat, so what is positioned as more of a threat is the idea of the curse itself, and this is scariest when it’s presented in a fairly vague metaphysical way. So one thing I did like is that Norman has these visions essentially where the material fabric of his world seems to rip apart and this is done with a ripping paper effect. And one of the things that disappointed me about Paranorman is that it didn’t utilise the medium of stop-motion as well as it could have done. Like, the character designs would have been much the same in CGI. Coraline makes an incredible use of the medium, it’s a very tactile film in a way that Paranorman isn’t so much.

Ren: Yeah, I agree. I mean the animation still looks very good, it’s not as incredible as Coraline, but the moment when Norman’s doing a play at school and he has this vision, and the stage and all the people on it just sort of crinkle up and it turns into a forest, it’s a very cool effect.

Adam: It’s made of paper!

Ren: It’s made of paper! That’s a reference no-one will get.*

Adam: Yeah, that’s really effective. So these moments of reality shifting, and similarly the final confrontation, which is quite similar to the final confrontation with the other mother in Coraline, in as much as the location explodes into this great white void - that’s all really good, and that’s very effective and those bits were quite thrilling - but there’s not much sense of mystery, really. It’s all done in this oddly straightforward way. So Coraline, I think is very effectively creepy because it situates this other place within the home. Because Coraline, for those who don’t know, finds this little door in her house that leads to another world that looks very similar to her own but everyone has buttons for eyes, and everything is just slightly off. It has this sense of the uncanny, and there’s very little of the uncanny in Paranorman, it’s all weirdly straightforward.

Ren: Yeah, that’s a good point. Because it has all the Halloween-y spooky trappings but it’s not actually very creepy at all.

Adam: Yeah, it’s odd because if anything it uses those Halloween trappings for a satirical commentary on commercialisation that adults might maybe get but will probably go over kids’ heads anyway.

Ren: It is tonally pretty odd.

Adam: Yeah, and when we get onto Boxtrolls that is tonally even odder, I would say. But yeah, and one thing I found quite strange is what kind of traditions were being drawn on. So what I found very odd is, at first I found it very hard to work out how old Norman was, because of the kind of films he’s watching.

Ren: Yeah, because at the beginning he’s watching a slasher film?

Adam: Exactly. So at first I thought he’s going to be watching hammer horror films, like Bela Lugosi, or slightly campy 1960s films, but the films he seems like he’s watching are actually quite a bit nastier than that, and the music they use is all 1980s synthy, so they seem more like direct-to-video nasties. Which I found quite strange. I mean, I do have friends who grew up watching 18 rated horror films, so I guess that partly comes down to one’s own childhood. I very much didn’t, and to give some indication of this, my mum wrote a letter to ofcom, and she doesn’t regularly do this, I think this is the only letter she ever wrote to ofcom, because the trailer to Nightmare on Elm Street was broadcast on terrestrial before the 9 o’clock watershed, and this so deeply upset me and caused so many sleepless nights for both me and my parents, that she wrote a letter to ofcom about it. So I very much did not grow up watching Nightmare on Elm street or stuff like that. Can you remember how old norman is?

Ren: He’s 11.

Adam: I don’t want to be over-censorious, and people have their own modes of parenting, but I did think (Adam assumes a Daily Telegraph type voice here) ‘I’m not sure about these films he’s watching!’

Ren: Yeah, and it kind of would have made more sense to be a Hammer Horror film, something a bit older and more classic.

Adam: — More traditionally ghoulish rather than genuinely nasty. This is something we touched on before we began the recording so maybe you can talk about it, that to me sort of started that motif, if you will, of vague inappropriateness.

Ren: Yes, it really doesn’t seem to quite know to whom it’s pitching itself and there’s some very odd jokes.

Adam: Yeah, there’s some kind of innuendo around Norman (and he’s still very young) and there’s a couple of lines where his parents think he might have pornography under the bed - there’s some kind of joke around that, and I’m like: ‘He’s elelven! Why would you say this!’

Ren: Yeah, and then there’s this just bafflingly inappropriate scene where — we’ll get to this character — but, Norman’s friend who’s a dorky kind of kid, Norman comes round to his house and this kid is watching a video of his mum doing aerobics.

Adam: Was it definitely his mum?

Ren: it was definitely his mum!*

Adam: That’s bizzare!

Ren: And he has it paused guiltily like what’s he doing, watching this —

Adam: And she says ‘are you watching my aerobics video again’ like suggesting this is a thing, like he’s done this before.

Ren: It’s his mum!! I don’t know why they would make that joke, that insinuation…

Adam: Yeah, and it leaves this dimension to the character that is not picked up again, it’s just there. And that’s the way of quite a lot of the humour in Paranorman, and you’re like ‘What?’ That’s really troubling!’, Like the implications of that are very worrying and it’s just left there.

Like there’s a similar dubious joke, and it’s funny, we’re talking about children’s horror and I’m wondering if it is okay to talk about on the podcast, but apparently it’s okay for a PG rated film, so. But there’s a joke, it’s very oddly phrased, so Norman has this eccentric uncle - is that a fair characterisation? An eccentric uncle voiced by John Goodman, of many Coen Brothers films, and his uncle is rejected by the rest of the family, he clearly isn’t very able to look after himself —

Ren: He looks quite like Mr Twit from the Roald Dahl book ‘The Twits’.

Adam: Yeah, but with The Twits there’s this emphasis on the idea that they’re not looking after themselves because they don’t want to, because they’re jerks, but you get the sense that he might have genuine difficulties with his mental health. He’s meant to be seen as a kooky, crazy person who lives alone and is often talked about as being a homeless person for instance. Anyway, there’s a really odd joke about him walking in on Norman in the bathroom or something —

Ren: Yeah, because he dies, and then he comes to tell Norman about the prophecy, and that Norman has to stop the dead from rising, and he does this in ghost form while Norman’s on the toilet, well, he’s in the toilet stall.

Adam: And he arises from the cistern, from the toilet. I mean we could probably do a whole episode on ghosts in toilets in children’s horror, this being in Round The Twist and Harry Potter.

Ren: Oh yeah! Hmmm.

Adam: Note that one down! But yeah, there’s a very odd joke about Norman says something like ‘he’s done that before’.

Ren: Does he?

Adam: Yeah, I can’t quite remember, I don’t want to misrepresent it, but there’s some kind of comment suggesting that this has happened once before. And I wasn’t sure how adult the joke was meant to be, but it was definitely meant to be an awkward joke. It just had a slightly wrong tone and it made me feel a bit uncomfortable, and I thought ‘what are you doing with that?’

Ren: I mean, that’s kind of how I feel about Paranorman. It has a slightly wrong tone, and it males me feel uncomfortable. I did want to talk about one thing that I thought was good before we keep talking about stuff we don’t like. Which is I thought the bit that was actually pretty scary was when Norman sees a vision of these old-timey pilgrim people sentencing Agatha, who is the witch, and we’re led to believe that she’s a stereotypical ugly old crone kind of witch, and we see just the perspective of the adults looming down and telling her that she’s going to be executed, and then it’s revealed that she’s an eleven year old girl, and she’s terrified.

Adam: (deadpan) Exactly, she’s exactly the kind of person you don’t want to see executed, unlike old ladies.

Ren: (deadpan) Unlike an ugly old woman, yes.

Adam: (deadpan) A cute girl.

Ren: So I thought that brought home the horror of that, what the townspeople are doing pretty effectively.

Adam: And also this is something that comes up time and time again in young adult literature, of very serious, the most serious of themes being discussed in a medium for children or young adults. But essentially then, it becomes a story about the limits of forgiveness and redemption for child murderers, it’s dealing with the same kind of questions that South Africa, for instance, dealt with with the truth and reconciliation.

Seriously though! it’s essentially trying to deal with it, it very much weighs in on the side of forgiveness - whether it puts too much pressure on the victims of murder, serious violence, to forgive in this case. I mean I admire the fact that it was trying to deal with the topic of forgiveness, albeit in a film that feels very irreverent and throwaway, so you’ve got this film with all these slightly inappropriate jokes and doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously, and then it’s dealing with some very serious topics.

Ren: I did want to talk about the message of the film, because I did find it quite confused.

Adam: How so?

Ren: So okay, the central conceit is maybe they talk about fear making people do terrible things. So these old pilgrim townspeople were scared of Agatha and her supposed witchcraft and so they killed her, and they kind of draw a parallel between that and the current day townspeople, who are so scared of the zombies that they’re going to destroy everything in their rampage. And that makes sense, but then it kind of seems to half tie this into a message about bullying. So you shouldn’t bully people like Norman and Agatha because they’re different and you’re scared of them. But then it doesn’t really extend this message to Neil, who is the kid we talked about, Norman’s friend, who the film makes very cringy jokes at his expense.

Adam: At the expense of him being effeminate for one thing.

Ren: Effeminate, and fat and just generally dorky I think. But they’re not bullying him because they’re scared of him. They’re bullying him because they’re contemptuous of him and -

Adam: Toxic masculinity and such.

Ren: So I feel like it has a slightly confused message about who it’s okay to bully.

Adam: Yeah, I think that’s fair. It’s an odd film in part because although its sentiment is theoretically on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed and those who are bullied and those who suffer, in terms of its humour its jokes seem to be at the expense of the very people it’s pretending, or claiming, or trying to champion.

Ren: Yeah, exactly.

Adam: Which is problematic!

Ren: Yeah, so aside form the dodgy humour, the other main issue I have with Paranoman is the characters are just extremely stereotyped.

Adam: Well, Norman himself’s alright, I think.

Ren: Yeah, well Norman’s alright. He’s more of a character than the rest of them.

Adam: Norman’s a fairly likeable character, because he seems quite earnest, and he’s relatively reserved and shy and at the same time he’s enthusiastic about his interests, like X-rated horror films. He’s quite well meaning, he’s plucky and courageous but not unrealistically so. As a protagonist he’s not bad.

Ren: No, it’s more the surrounding cast.

Adam: Like his sister is very much -

Ren: Very valley girl, cheerleader.

Adam: Yeah, I’ve written ‘valley girl stereotype’ down in my notes. I think that is the stereotype they were going for.

Ren: Yeah, she doesn’t really have anything more to her - well, she stands up for Norman at the end.

Adam: I know you wanted to talk about the reveal, I don’t know whether to call it a reveal or a reversal joke, with the character that the film frames as potentially being her love interest. Who is Neil’s older brother.

Ren: Neil’s older brother, I’ve actually forgotten his name.

Adam: Is it Mitch?

Ren: Yeah, it might be Mitch. So he’s framed as this again, quite stereotypical muscly jock character, and Norman’s sister, Courtney, (I remember her name), is sort of hanging onto him and she’s obviously interested in him throughout the whole film. And then right at the end, like right at the end of the film, she’s trying to suggest they maybe go on a date or something, and he says ‘you should meet my boyfriend, you’d love him’.

Adam: And I don’t know if it’s meant to be a joke or not. Because one one level it seems like it might be progressive because it’s tossed off, like ‘hey this character’s gay, it doesn’t matter’ but then it does use the same structure essentially as a pull-back and reveal joke.

Ren: Yes, I think it’s a bit of a Dumbledore really. Because I think it’s sort of giving a veneer of progressiveness without having to do anything.

Adam: That could be the tagline of Paranorman. ‘Paranorman or how to have a veneer of progressiveness without having to do anything’.

Ren: Yeah, basically. Because in an alternate imagining of the film, if we had met his boyfriend during the film and they had done fighting zombies together, and it wasn’t done in a homophobic way, or whatever, that would be genuinely progressive. But as it is it just feels like a kind of gotcha, or possible also a joke at the sister’s expense because it’s like ‘haha you fancied him but he’s gay’.

Adam: And certainly the film seems on the whole it’s on the side of Norman, and not so much on the side of his sister.

I’ve got some weird notes down about this film! I don’t know if it showed that I wasn’t very engaged, I’ve written for instance ‘missed King of the Hill connections’.

Ren: Uh huh?

Adam: Now of course, I always miss King of the Hill connections. But why I expected there to be King of the Hill connections specifically in Paranorman, I have literally no idea. But I must include my sister’s observation, because she asked me specifically to do so. So Phoebe was more on board with the film than me, didn’t love it but kind of liked it, but the main thing that she did like was that Norman has an electric toothbrush, and she was delighted. She said ‘you never see electric toothbrushes in films!’ and asked specifically that I mention this on the podcast. She was very pleased about that.

Ren: Cool. I mean that’s some representation right there then.

Adam: Yeah, I mean she hates using non-electric toothbrushes so she felt validated at least. But yeah, I think generally it’s pretty tepid. It’s not a great film by any means. So let’s go on to another not great film —

Ren: Yeah, oh let’s!

Adam: Although a film that I think is more frustrating than Paranorman because I thought it had more potential to be a great film and it very much frustrated me that it wasn’t, because I really wanted to like it. So we’re talking about Boxtrolls —

Ren: Yeah, um, ‘The Boxtrolls’

Adam: Oh, “The Boxtrolls” they like to be referred to -

Ren: laughs for too long

Adam: Do you want to explain ‘The Boxtrolls’?

Ren: Mmm-hmm. So it’s another film from the Laika studio, released in 2014, so two years after Paranorman. It’s also based on a novel, which I haven’t read, so I can’t speak to how much of the dubious content of this film is present in the novel… but presumably some of it? The premise is that a town is plagued by creatures called boxtrolls, who at the beginning of the film are believed to have captured and killed a baby, and who are consequently being hunted down by a man called Archibald Snatcher and his gang of ‘red hats’ (they wear red hats). But as it turns out, the boxtrolls are gentle scavengers who have raised the baby, Eggs, named after what is on his box as they all wear cardboard boxes, and Snatcher wants to exterminate them just to be rewarded with power and a white hat from the duke.

Adam: Yeah, and the emphasis is odd, because obviously one would think you’d only want the hat for the power that it bestows, but he does seem pretty keen on just its hat qualities as well.

Ren: That’s true, yeah.

Adam: It’s interesting because at first it presents itself as being a relatively traditional horror film, so it starts with quite a lot of visual cues to German expression, so slanted camera angles and deep shadows and the boxtrolls creeping through the night stealing away this baby, and then of course it reveals itself as more of a fantasy film than a horror film.

Ren: Yeah, sort of fantasy-adventure.

Adam: Sort of slightly grotesque fantasy-adventure Victoriana-lite thing.

Ren: So, you had told me about this film and told me about the bad stuff that we’re going to get into, so when I sat down to watch it I knew it was going to get dodgy, but at the beginning I was really enjoying it, and it could have been really good.

Adam: So, what were you enjoying about it?

Ren: I enjoyed the setup and I liked the montage of the baby Eggs growing up, and he’s making music with his boxtroll adopted father, and he’s smashing lightbulbs in time with the music, I thought that was quite sweet and lovely.

Adam: Yeah, it’s got a kind of Tom Waits vibe. The sort of make-do and scrapyard aesthetic with the music, which was quite cool.

Ren: And then, you know, Richard Aoyade turned up, and I was like ‘oh, that’s Richard Aoyade’s voice’.

Adam: Which is very recognisable. I quite liked the aesthetic, I mean, it is grotesque but it is kind of winningly grotesque. It’s more interesting than Paranorman, I think. Like everything’s sort of crooked and run-down and lots of jaunty angles and generally that aesthetic of make-do and mend, different materials have been stacked onto one another, I think it looks like a more interesting world to inhabit than the world of Paranoman.

I actually saw it upon release in the cinema, and it certainly was very vivid on a big screen, and it felt like a living breathing world which is an impressive thing to pull off in stop-motion. And it has some similarities aesthetically with the work of Jiří Barta, who is a Czech stop-motion animator whose most famous film is a version of the pied piper of Hamlin he did in the ‘80s called ‘Krysař’, which is all carved out of deep red mahogany wood, and then uses real rats, well, dead rats animated and then everything else wooden puppets. And I did wonder watching it, if it had been a bit inspired by that, because some of the aesthetic is quite similar. So visually I quite enjoyed it. It’s certainly striking, and I always admire stop-motion for the sheer amount of craft, and time, that goes into such a film.

Ren: Yeah, absolutely! And that’s why I really did come into, well, not so much Boxtrolls because you’d already told me about it, but I definitely came into Paranorman wanting to enjoy it because I love the stop-motion and it does look gorgeous.

Adam: So where do you think things start to go wrong, for you?

Ren: Okay. So. There’s quite a lot of gross-out humour going on in this film, and I think some of it is kind of disgusting but harmless, like, there’s this whole thing about cheese - cheese implies status, the duke hordes cheese and eats it in his private room wearing his white hat, but anyway, Eggs ends up going to this fancy party and spits out wads of cheese from his mouth onto a plate and then eats it again. And it’s gross, but whatever. But I think where it starts to get more suspect is that a lot of it is getting us to be disgusted by Archibald Snatcher himself, who is the exterminator character.

Adam: And he’s sort of presented as the aspiring working class, basically, like he’s seen as being abject basically, he clearly aspires to have the power of the king or nobility but his manners aren’t up to scratch, so his teeth are yellow and crooked and he’s shown as being ugly and uncouth and ungainly, his movements are very awkward, and his clothes don’t quite fit right, he’s seen as not having the grace or good breeding to be a real member of the aristocracy.

Ren: Yeah, and he somewhat resembles a Timothy Spall character, though he’s not voiced by Timothy Spall, but like Wormtail in Harry Potter or whenever Timothy Spall plays these characters that are quite grubby and awful. ,

Adam: Or a little bit like the persona Martin Jacques of the Tiger Lillies puts on. I mean, you’re from London, I’m not, is that a cockney accent he’s got?

Ren: It’s London-ish. I don’t know if it’s cockney.

Adam: Well Laika aren’t an English studio, so it’s maybe a sort of generic like English but not upper-class English accent.

Ren: And there’s also somewhat an aspect of the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Adam: But you were saying about Snatcher.

Ren: Yeah, so it gets us to be disgusted by him in two main ways, neither of which I like. So the first thing is that the duke and his cronies eat mountains of cheese every day when they should be governing the town, and Snatcher desperately wants to be part of their cheese-eating society, except that he is allergic to cheese, and when he eats it, to sort of try and be part of that life, his hands and face swell up horrendously.

So the film is representing both his gluttony and his lust for power in these kind of deliberately horrific transformation scenes where his face ends up swollen, and discoloured, and disfigured basically. He’s already, as you were saying, depicted as an ugly character and that age-old trope of the villain being physically ugly, but the cheese scenes seem to really go all out in making him disfigured in a way that is meant to be frightening and disgusting. Which I think is fairly shitty, as I don’t know, I hope that maybe at this point in time we should be trying to dismantle the trope that looking different and having a facial difference is synonymous with evil, and I feel like it’s really playing into that and I don’t like it. What do you think?

Adam: Yeah, I agree. It seems to be taking moral things that are really nothing to do with what one looks like, or ones bodily expression and somehow trying to make them bodily. So obviously, anyone can be proud or aspire to power but somehow this ends up being expressed through bodily deformity in the film. And you think: ‘why?’ And one thing I felt, and it’s partly why I bought class into it, is really - is he a king or a duke?

Ren: I think he’s a duke.

Adam: So the duke and his lesser duke-dom cronies, whatever they’re called, the White Hats, aren’t really… they may be vaguely presented as ridiculous and selfish in the film but they certainly face no comeuppance in the way that Snatcher does, and they behave just as appallingly. They’re just as awful as he is. If snatcher is the person who commits the genocide of the boxtrolls, right, then the White Hats commissioned it. They’re just as venal and awful, and yet they’re not really shown to be the villains of the film, they’e not heroic but they’re not villainized, and maybe not coincidentally, they look a lot more conventionaly attractive and dashing than Snatcher does, and they’re also far posher, and they don’t have problems with eating cheese!

There’s this weird trope of, almost very Victorian, and it has this sort of Victoriana but also in the worst possible way, this Victorian idea of the body as destiny, certain people are bred to rule and certain people aren’t and one of Snatcher’s main things he’s demonised for is aspiring above his station basically, he’s not the right type to be one of the White Hats. And this seems an incredibly regressive notion, the kind of thing you’d find in ‘The Water Babies’ or something, Victorian children’s literature.

Ren: Yeah, it is a good point! Because the White Hats literally spend the money that should be going to a children’s hospital to buy a giant cheese, and yet they are not as villainized as Snatcher.

Adam: So, did you want to talk more about Snatcher?

Ren: (Resigned sigh) Yeah. So that’s complaint number one, but then the film kind of does the same thing again for Snatcher, but this time in terms of gender. So warning, this is the point where we’re going to start talking about transmisogynistic and transphobic tropes. So Snatcher is performing shows as a foreign prima donna called Madame Frou Frou to curry favour with the duke, who doesn’t know that she’s Snatcher of course, and you can see where this is going a mile off. So then we get this other, heavy air quotes, “disgusting, frightening, grotesque” aspect of Snatcher which is his femininity.

So, I, yeah. I mean, it is just very transmisogynistic which for people who don’t know that word it’s kind of the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that is levelled at trans women and trans-feminine people, but it just encompasses a lot of these tropes of seeing femininity in a male character as disgusting and whatever. So there’s this scene where Eggs tries to show the crows that Madame Frou Frou is actually Archibald Snatcher by removing his wig, which is actually like a very old transphobic movie trope that goes back decades, like trans women having wigs pulled off their heads to reveal… anyway.

Adam: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Ren: Yeah, it actually is. And then right at the end the duke realises that they are the same person and says ‘I regret so much’.

Adam: Which is just a vile joke, it’s really…

Ren: It’s really… yeah.

Adam: I saw it with Rachel, who was my partner at the time, and Rachel is someone who has read de Sade and found it funny. She’s not easily bothered or upset, and I remember she winced at that bit, and afterwards said that must have been horrible for any trans people in the audience and was really pissed off about it basically, and I was too. And there’s also this general sense that the White Hats harass Madame Frou Frou and then ha ha ha, they were harassing someone who was a man all along! Which is horrible!

Ren: (Deep sigh)

Adam: And it really left a sour taste in my mouth.

Ren: Yeah, I mean once I got to this, it just overshadowed the whole film. I’m not going to watch this film again, I’m going to tell people not to watch this film because it’s just really overt. And I’ve seen people say it’s not transphobic because he’s not like a trans woman character, but that’s not the point. It’s the trope and the perpetuation of he trope that has real life consequences.

Adam: And I don’t think Madame Frou Frou is merely shown as Snatcher’s disguise, I think Snatcher is shown as enjoying embodying Madame Frou Frou, it is shown as an extension of Snatcher’s identity.

Ren: Yeah, I agree. And there were a few things I noticed that reinforced that. Like when snatcher thinks that he’s won and he’s being given a white hat, because he thinks he’s killed the boxtrolls and the duke asks him for his full name, and he gives his middle name as Penelope: ‘Oh ha hah ha he has a girl’s name ha ha’, and then near the end when he’s invading the boxtrolls’ cavern and he’s driving this huge roaring machine, he’s still wearing the lipstick from the Madame Frou Frou outfit, to keep that association going.

Adam: I mean, it’s hard without having actually seen the film to get it wholly across, but it really does feel unpleasant. And it does feel phobic. And if Rachel feels like this, that’s saying something because really she is not someone who is easily offended. And it’s a kid’s film! It wouldn’t be acceptable in an adult film but it feels even nastier being in a kid’s film, especially where the message of something like Paranorman or The Boxtrolls, ostensibly, is meant to be about embracing difference. The whole narrative of Boxtrolls is meant to be, oh how dare you assume the boxtrolls were terrible awful creatures, they were nice all along. And then having this kind of sneering transmisogny in it really undermines that.

Ren: Yeah, it really does.

Adam: It’s worth saying that neither film was directed by Henry Selick, which I didn’t know at first, I think when Paranorman first came out I assumed it was Selick because I associate him so strongly with the studio, but in fact Selick has only made Coraline and then the CGI short Moongirl for Laika, and has yet sadly to release another film. I loved Selick’s films growing up, The Nightmare before Christmas was probably my favourite children’s film, and I like James and the Giant Peach quite a lot, but I do associate it with travel sickness, because I first watched it on a ferry as a kid, so sadly, I don’t know if it’s partly an OCD thing but those associations just stick. So even thinking about the film just makes me feel a bit queasy, which is a shame because I quite liked it.

Monkey Bone less so, which is not a masterpiece, though I did read an interesting Instagram post by Rose Mcgowan a few weeks ago I think which she made last year about monkey bone, and saying the studio took it off Selick’s hands halfway through production. And she reckons all of the good things about the film are due to Selick, and all the crass juvenile humour in it is what came after he was dismissed. Which is a shame, because there are moments in Monkey Bone which are visually astonishing, it’s got some of the best art direction I’ve ever seen in a dark comedy-fantasy film, but a lot of the humour is just crass and puerile. But apparently that’s not Selick’s fault, which is nice to know.

Ren: So yeah, he is not responsible for —

Adam: For The Boxtrolls. It’s a shame, I don’t really want to end it on such a downbeat note, because we didn’t like Paranorman and we liked Boxtrolls even less.

Ren: Oh, I’ll talk about one thing I did like from Boxtrolls. I really enjoyed the little girl who’s the duke’s daughter and her incredibly ghoulish preoccupation with the boxtrolls.

Adam: Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about her, she is ace! I think she’s maybe voiced by Elle Fanning, Dakota Fanning’s younger sister? Yeah, she’s really scrappy and ghoulish and bitey. It’s been a while since I watched Boxtrolls, does she bite people?

Ren: I think Eggs bites her first, but then she threatens to bite later on.

Adam: Ah good, good.

Ren: There’s a bit where she encounters Eggs, and she’s like ‘Did the boxtrolls eat your parents? Did they skin them alive? Did they let you watch, I mean, did they make you watch?’, and it’s quite fun.

Adam: That’s a brilliant impression, I really enjoyed that

Ren: So yeah, that was one thing I enjoyed from the boxtrolls.

Adam: So it will be interesting to see what Laika does next as a studio, I heard talk of Paranorman 2, which doesn’t get me too excited but i’d certainly like to see a new Selick film, of course. And although I’m not always a massive fan of Neil Gaiman, I do think Coraline’s brilliant, and I think he’s very good at writing modern-day fairy tales essentially, and I would love to see another stop-motion film based on a Gaiman kid’s book, like ‘The Wolves In The Walls’ for instance, would make for a delicious stop-motion film that would be very enjoyable.

Ren: That would be great, yeah. So I don’t know what we’re going to do for our next episode, but I would like to do something that we both enjoyed more.

Adam: Yeah, I think we’ll hopefully look at something we both enjoyed more, maybe a book this time.

Ren: Mmhmm. cool. So, do you have a sign-off?

Adam: I thought we could combine the two we did last time and kind of switch it round, so: ‘Keep it creepy, spooky kids’.

Ren: Nice. alright. ‘Keep it creepy, spooky kids’

Adam: I mean, I don’t know if it’s easier to keep things creepy or keep things spooky, I’m not sure. And is it better to be spooky or creepy.

Ren: Questions.

Adam: A question to be answered next time, perhaps. Bye!

Ren: Bye!

Outro plays

Ren: Thank you for listening to our podcast, if you want to get in touch we’re on twitter at @stillscaredpod and our email is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Our intro music is by maki yamazaki, and you can find more of her work at makiyamazaki.com, and our outro is by joe kelly and his band etao shin are at etaoshin.co.uk. Our logo is by Letty Wilson and you can find her work at behance.net/lettydraws. and finally if you want to leave us a nice review on Itunes, we’d appreciate that. thanks!

• I don’t know, maybe you’re all also British comedy nerds. It’s a reference to the very first sketch of The Armando Iannucci Shows from 2001, in which a couple are being shown around a new house and then realise that it is all… made of paper.

• It literally only occurred to me as I was writing this transcript, after having seen the film two times, that it is presumably meant to be an aerobics DVD owned by his mother, as opposed to a DVD of his own mother doing aerobics. Because people don’t usually own DVDs of themselves doing aerobics. So that’s my mistake, although I maintain that it is ambiguously phrased.