'The Boxtrolls': The cheese above, the scamps below

'Hide your cheese!"

"Hide your delicious babies!"

Such are the warnings bellowed by a motley crew of exterminators in The Boxtrolls, an antic stop-motion animated tale set in the quaint town of Cheesebridge, where the jumble of old houses and cobblestone streets swoop up to a crazy peak and a species of toothy, nattering creatures lives underground, scavenging and thieving. But not, as it turns out, eating children, or harming them in any way.

Adapted from Here Be Monsters!, a jolly picture book by Alan Snow, and hailing from the same animation studio, Laika, responsible for Coraline and ParaNorman, the film nicely conjures a Victorian-era fairy-tale landscape. The titular critters clothe themselves in jettisoned cartons used to ship milk, tea, biscuits, and whatnot. The trolls are impish and furtive, emerging from manholes and digging through trash for treasures to take back to their lair. Things that tick, tock, and clang are especially prized.

But thanks to the dastardly ambitions of one Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley) and the haughty indifference of the local noble, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), the hunt is on to round up all the boxtrolls - a hunt that results in the discovery of a long-missing, presumed-devoured child. This would be Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright, of Game of Thrones), who has grown up among the trolls, speaking their language and thinking himself one of them.

When Eggs meets Portley-Rind's daughter, Winnie (Elle Fanning), boy and girl team to set things right in a world of, at the very least, misplaced priorities. The high-muckety-mucks would rather spend their sums on a giant wheel of Gouda than finance a children's hospital. What kind of world is that?

Design-wise, it's a wonderful world, full of Rube Goldberg contraptions below and colorful Dickensian squalor and excess above. Where codirectors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi's The Boxtrolls falls short is in giving us characters that never escape the yoke (and yolk) of their cartoonish trappings. In Coraline, admittedly a darker, scarier affair (and from a different director, Henry Selick), the heroine had an emotional core. She was haunted, and haunting.

But The Boxtrolls does have fun with the concept of good vs. evil, with the notions of power and perception. Speaking of perception, the film is in theaters in both 2-D and 3-D iterations. By its very nature, stop-motion already looks, well,  dimensional , so save yourself a few bucks and forgo the stereoscopic eyewear. You can use the extra cash for a nice wedge of Gouda.

Directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi. With the voices of Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning. Distributed by Focus Features.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 mins.

Parent's guide: PG (cartoon violence).

Playing at: area theaters.EndText