Actor Ben Kingsley is laidback and loving it

On the first day that Ben Kingsley lent his voice to stop-motion animation film The Boxtrolls, the distinguished thespian tried out various positions to see which would work best for him. First, the conventional approach: standing at the microphone. Then he sat. Neither worked. And then he thought of lying down.

"That released the voice," the actor says in his crisp, resonant tones. "The voice was released when I was relaxed, it wasn't pushed in any way - there was a grandeur and a confidence. Although semi-reclining like that did inhibit me from any physical gestures!"

In Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi's The Boxtrolls, Kingsley lends his distinctive voice to Archibald Snatcher, the villain of the town of Cheesebridge whose sole ambition in life is to annihilate its population of Boxtrolls - harmless subterranean creatures who are clothed in boxes.

Based on writer-illustrator Alan Snow's quirky Here be Monsters!, the Victorian-era fantasy comedy is packed with a raft of odd characters such as cabbageheads, and features catapults made from women's frilly underwear. The 544-page novel's rambling tale had to be condensed into a streamlined family film that takes as its central theme the evil intentions of Snatcher against the ugly but cute creatures protecting Eggs, an orphaned human boy they raised from babyhood.

"[The literary source is] a huge book, with a cast of thousands and so many crazy ideas and plot twists," co-director Stacchi says. "It took a while to find that emotional core. When we pitched it to [producer] Travis [Knight], we felt the story was about the orphan boy. We kept working on scripts, winnowing down, but we always focused on the boy's story."

The creation of Laika - the Hillsboro, Oregon-based animation studio behind Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012) - The Boxtrolls boasts a star-studded voice cast which includes 15-year-old Isaac Hempstead-Wright ( Game of Thrones) as Eggs and 16-year-old Elle Fanning as the feisty Winnie who Eggs teams up with to save his non-human "family" from Snatcher.