Review: Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo and the Two Strings (PG)

USA 2016 102 mins Dir: Travis Knight Cast (voices): Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Art Parkinson, Rooney Mara, Ralph Fiennes, George Takei

What a glorious, golden age for animation we’re currently living in. From CGI Pixar highs like the masterful Inside Out to claymation delights like Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep and wondrous confections that blend the two approaches together (Netflix’s recent, enchanting The Little Prince), the boundaries of animated storytelling are truly being pushed like never before. Riding the crest of the wave are the stop motion wizards Laika, already responsible for classics Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, and whose latest, Kubo and The Two Strings, continues the rich vein of imagination seen in their previous efforts. Sweeping viewers into the majesty of the Japanese landscape, it’s something to behold.

Another hallmark of Laika’s is their forthright committment to emotional maturity and a willingness to embrace imagery that will no doubt provoke and scare younger viewers. Coraline had people with buttons for eyes and Kubo begins on a similarly dramatic note as the infant version of our title character washes ashore with his mother Sariatu during a violent storm. The older Kubo narrates: “Don’t blink,” he urges. “If you must blink, do it now.” Immediately we get a sense of dramatic heft and storytelling sweep that engulfs us in the mystery of Kubo’s backstory: how did he end up here at such a young age? And why is one of his eyes missing?

To reveal why would entail a spoiler; needless to say we jump ahead several years as the now grown-up Kubo (Art Parkinson) cares for the apparently catatonic Sariatu, who only seems to stir during sunset. Having inherited a love of storytelling from his mother, Kubo is famous for enthralling the local village with his tales of magic and derring-do, brilliantly visualised as origami figures bursting into life via the power of his instrument the Shamisen.

Even so, during an attempt to reach out to his deceased samurai father Hanzo (one of the figures immortalised in his stories), Kubo unwittingly summons evil from his past in the form of his mother’s evil Sisters (voiced in eerily glacial fashion by Rooney Mara). This sets in motion a dramatic adventure in which he must discover his father’s magical armour in order to defeat evil from the past, his mother’s magic having brought to life a wooden monkey charm (Charlize Theron) who acts as a loyal companion on his quest. Also on the journey is Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), an insect-samurai hybrid who has answers of his own regarding Kubo’s parentage. In particular, the spectral nature of Kubo’s grandfather the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) is something that has to be confronted.

Largely geared as a buddy movie adventure leavened with sequences of genuine wonder, there’s a slight nagging feeling that Kubo flirts more with conventional storytelling methods than anything Laika has done previously; certainly, there’s nothing as twisted as the alternate-parent story of Coraline, as heartwarming as the message of ParaNorman (with its lovely reminder that monsters are people too), or as ickily grungy as the sewer-dwelling inhabitants of The Boxtrolls. It’s a narrative whose familiar trajectory would be disappointing were it not for the genuinely emotive and breathtaking visuals, an instance where the physical stop motion environment quite simply is the story.

With richly blood-red skies giving way to snow-capped peaks and broiling seas, it’s deeply, beautifully engaged with the Japanese landscape and arguably marks a significant step up in stop motion sophistication, the very physicality of the medium adding to that engrossing blend of humanity laced with fantasy. And there’s no denying the stories-within-stories approach contains a lovely moral for young audiences, enforcing the sense that its the emotional rather than literal truths of our favourite fables that help us grow as people. Although it lacks the surprise of Laika’s finest, Kubo nevertheless proves they are able to bottle that elusive sense of big screen magic; no mean feat when the landscape is dotted with more attention-grabbing animated movies than ever.