Escape from the box!
Dylan O'Brien in The Maze Runner
Ben Rothstein/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
The Boxtrolls
Laika Inc./Focus Features
There's an accidental but oddly resonant double feature in theaters this week: the stop-motion animated movie The Boxtrolls, opening Sept. 26, and The Maze Runner, the latest YA dystopian drama to triumph at the box office. One's aimed at teens while the other looks to please hip parents along with their kids, but at their centers, both are stealthy portrayals of communities that have accepted oppression as their due, at least until an outsider forces them to change.
Also, they've got a real cube theme going on.
The Maze Runner, like fellow franchises Divergent and The Hunger Games, may ultimately have revolution on its mind, but in the first installment, the characters have no idea what they'd even rebel against. Their memories have been wiped, and aside from their names, they don't remember anything about their lives before they were dropped into the giant labyrinth in which they spend months or years. They've figured out the rules by painful trial and error, and settled into a tenuous peace in the grassy four-walled enclosure at the center of the maze, the only place that's safe.
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