'The Boxtrolls' Trailer: A Young Troll Learns He Is Actually Human

Laika, the animation studio behind Coraline and ParaNorman, has a new film coming this fall: The Boxtrolls. The story adapts Alan Snow's book Here Be Monsters, and features a fantasized town in which box-wearing trolls comb the streets at night. A young boy, nicknamed Eggs, falls into the clutches of the trolls... and they proceed to raise him as one of their own. A new Boxtrolls trailer shows what happens when Eggs is drawn back towards human life.

Because this is Laika, the animation here is all stop-motion. While there is some CG used to smooth over seams and in a few cases fill out the backgrounds with extras, everything else seen on screen is something built by hand. The town streets are miniature sets, the villain's big monster machine is built in sections; even the glowing ripples of water seen in a shot when Eggs stands at the bottom of a ladder were created with old-school light refraction techniques. Check out the trailer below.

Eggs is voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark on Game of Thrones) while Elle Fanning (Sleeping Beauty in Maleficent) is Winnie, who helps bring Eggs back to human life. Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette, Jared Harris, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Richard Ayoade also provide voices.

The Boxtrolls opens in the US on September 26. (The UK gets it on September 12; other countries might not get it until October.) Yahoo has the trailer.

LAIKA's third film is The Boxtrolls, based on Alan Snow's bestselling novel Here Be Monsters.   Introducing audiences to a new breed of family – The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they've built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. When the town's villain, Archibald Snatcher (Academy Award® winner Ben Kingsley), comes up with a plot to get rid of the Boxtrolls, Eggs decides to venture above ground, "into the light," where he meets and teams up with fabulously feisty Winnie (Elle Fanning). Together, these soft-boiled detectives uncover the hidden connections in Eggs' past and devise a daring plan to save his unique family.