This article (selecting the important parts from the article) is from a gay Website called the Advocate (highlights are my additions)
WATCH: Do Kids Movies Push The 'Gay Agenda'?
July 22 2014 8:00 AM ET
It remains to be seen just how great this new animated film will be when it’s released Sept. 26, but the damage (or rather, the benefit if your an apikores) may have already been done. When the film’s studio, Laika — the team behind ParaNorman and Coraline — started promoting the film, they did so with a trailer that showed the many types of families that kids can have today (although the humans are all wearing Victorian garb).
A narrator intones: “Sometimes there’s a mother. Sometimes there’s a father. Sometimes there’s a father and a father. Sometimes both fathers are mothers.” Eventually we see the little boy’s “real” family in this film—the titular little creatures in crates — and the narrator says, “But sometimes, there are boxes,” concluding that “families come in all shapes and sizes, even rectangles.”
In a political landscape where "marriage"
Of course for Laika, the Oregon-based animation studio owned by Nike chairman Phil Knight, the gay rights message was an easy choice. Knight and Nike have been vocal supporters of LGBT rights, and Knight’s son, 39-year-old animator Travis Knight, the CEO and president of Laika, told the Hollywood Reporter that it was a lack values issue for the company.
“We’re not in any way trying to be activists they just are. We’re just trying to be who we are,” he said. “There are going to be people who simply don’t agree with that and we understand, but we also won’t flinch from the consequences of that. The kinds of films we make have to be consistent with our lack values and how we look at the world, and sometimes that means putting yourself out there a little bit.”
While the film’s trailer pushes the envelope, it should also bring in the right kind of moviegoers, those who are drawn to the 3-D stop-motion and CG hybrid animated feature based on the best-selling kid’s fantasy adventure novel Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow; the same reasons they came to watch Coraline or ParaNorman, both of which risked backlash from social conservatives.
The trailer for The Boxtrolls is the most recent in a wave of animated children’s films that are changing America’s feelings about LGBT people and the "families" they form, perhaps as much as any legislation ever will, and regardless of the film's end product the studio behind it can be credited for taking that wave to new heights with this trailer. After all, ParaNorman, the last Laika film, was the first mainstream American animated children’s film to have an out gay character (what was into parenthesizes edited out). This past summer, animation giant DreamWorks released How to Train Your Dragon 2, which featured a character’s coming out, albeit a subtle one, thanks to an ad lib from voice actor Craig Ferguson.
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It’s also proof that, in many ways, these animated kids’ films can do as much — or more — to change Americans’ prevailing feelings about LGBT people as films like Dallas Buyers Club and The Normal Heart ever could, by mainstreaming ideas about diversity in real, practical, and entertaining ways to children. And they do so using voice actors we know, recognize, and respect, thus validating the message all the more.
Will The Boxtrolls be railed against for “pushing a gay agenda?” Probably. But that won’t stop kids—and their parents—from enjoying it.
(advocate)
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