Kubo and the Two Strings

Year: 2016
Genre: Animated Drama
Directed: Travis Knight
Stars: Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, George Takei, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Brenda Vaccaro, Meyrick Murphy, Minae Noji, Alpha Takahashi, Laura Miro
Production: Laika Entertainment

If you must blink, do it now. So starts the tale of Kubo and the Two Strings, a chanbara inspired animated fantasy about a young boy with amazing gifts and even more amazing enemies. On a stormy night, the young baby Kubo (Parkinson) is brought to the outskirts of a remote village by his severe-looking mother (Theron). As Kubo grows into adolescence, he ventures into town every morning to earn money as an origami storyteller; using a magical shamisen to bring his characters to life. When he returns home, he cares for his sickly mother by the light of a makeshift hearth. Piecemeal by piecemeal the audience is primed into a world full of mystical creatures, selfless heroes, stunning magic and an age-old vendetta that pit's Kubo against virtual Gods.

As a work of stop-motion animation, Kubo and the Two Strings just might be the best looking thing to ever come out of Laika Entertainment. The images on screen are beyond breathtaking with painstaking detail brought into every spellbinding period specific set-piece and every darkly resonant tonal shift. Furthermore, young children (and the young boy or girl within us) will be beside themselves in awe when the origami magic really hits its crescendo midway through the movie. spiders, birds, snakes and even samurai warriors are constructed out of multicolored paper. As soon as the film was over I personally wanted to go home and dust off the old origami workbook and see if I remember how to make anything.

Still, not as somber as this image right here!

As a story, Kubo can be accredited for being uncharacteristically mature and even a little somber for a children's movie. It stands alone foisting upon the viewer themes of loss and remembrance that isn't just there as a hurdle to get over but as a reality meant to be both felt emotionally and in Kubo's case metaphysically. There's real pain within the excitement and fastidious world-building. Pain that may just go over the heads of your little ones but will hit anyone paying attention like a ton of bricks.

Yet Kubo isn't without some serious drawbacks the largest of which is its rather byzantine plot. After ignoring his mother's warnings of staying out of the moonlight, Kubo is stalked by two phantasms who seek to take his only eye. After fleeing, Kubo is allied with a Japanese Macaque (Theron) and a warrior resembling a Beetle (McConaughey). Revelations involving Kubo's new friends were probably expected to produce grasps but succeeding in only producing confusion. What's worse, the epic world building has an epic amount of exposition to go with it. Instead of letting the story breathe when it needs to, the rules of the film are clunk out like the rangy spare pieces of a model set. I wanted to know more about Beetle. I wanted to know more about Monkey. But instead we're treated to long tracts of dialogue explaining in exhausting detail the birds in the sky as congruently relevant psychopomp.

See, kind of annoying when you take too long to explain.

Yet if the worst thing that can be said about a movie is you wish you could know the characters better then we're in good hands. The voice acting is superb with the young Art Parkinson holding his own as a charismatic leading lad against a tsunami of veteran players. And director Travis Knight proves he's got the talent and discipline to maximize on the Homeric themes of Kubo having cut his teeth as lead animator on other Laika projects Coraline (2009) and Boxtrolls (2014). Here's hoping that with a little bit of fine tuning, Kubo's pulpy blend of sorcery and swordplay will yield a trilogy rivaling Hiroshi Inagaki's Musashi Miyamoto (1954-1956) works. As it stands now, Two Strings is quite a yarn.

Final Grade: B