The best parts of Kubo
and the Two Strings are its textures. A soft-spoken fantasy film, this
latest feature from stop-motion animation studio Laika has gorgeously tactile
creations. That’s a feature of the form, where the characters look like
stunningly molded action figures and dolls posed against striking dollhouse
spaces. But the craftspeople and artisans at Laika (now as much a consistent high-quality brand as Pixar, Aardman, or Ghibli) are thorough imaginers, able
to create a sense of magic in movement and sturdiness in worldbuilding. They
also can mold their house style to a variety of tones and moods. Look at their
works: dark Gaiman fable Coraline;
family-friendly Carpenter-influenced horror ParaNorman;
whimsical Dahl-meets-Dickens-meets-Monty-Python allegory The Boxtrolls. With Kubo,
the company has a project that takes on the flavoring of ancient Japanese
legend, from samurai tales to paper lanterns and a sense of fluid boundaries
between the mortal and the spiritual, the fated and the created. It’s a very
different sort of family fantasy: hushed, gentle, simple, spare.
Its widescreen story begins with Kubo, a one-eyed young boy (Art Parkinson) alone
with his mother in a cave at the edge of a small village. He earns money for
food by performing stories for the villagers, with heroes, villains, and
monsters he animates by making origami puppets come to life with his magic
stringed instrument. He strums and narrates while the art acts out his tales.
Soon, though, he’ll be in a real hero’s journey of his own. His mother always says
never be out at night. They have a tragic backstory. Kubo’s grandfather and
aunts on his mother’s side are cruel moon spirits who stole his eye when he was
a baby, killing his noble samurai father in the process. His mother has since
hidden them to protect the other eye, which they still crave. If moonlight spots
the boy, they will return to collect. Alas, this is what happens one night.
Kubo is attacked, and his mother uses her last bit of magic to spirit him away
and conjure a protector. What follows is a journey for the items that will save
his life, told in a mood as delicate and involving as the origami tales he
tells.
This is fascinating and intriguing fantasy setup, patiently
and slowly unfolding its world. It’s less about its simple story, but more
about how rich its visual opportunities are and how consuming its tone is. The
boy awakes to find his monkey figurine is now a real monkey (with the voice of
Charlize Theron), maternal, stern, and skilled in martial arts. She’s his
mother’s final gift. Together they must go on a fairly standard quest set up in
threes. There are three travelers: the boy, the monkey, and a man-sized beetle
(Matthew McConaughey) they meet along the way. Their goal is finding three
mythical objects to help them defeat the enemy: an unbreakable sword,
impenetrable armor, and a golden helmet. Getting those involves three deadly
obstacles: a giant skeleton, underwater eyeballs around a reef-sized toothy
maw, and a dragon. And there are three villains to be confronted: Kubo’s twin
porcelain witch aunts (hauntingly voiced by Rooney Mara), and his grandfather,
the evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes). Screenwriters Marc Haimes and Chris Butler,
with story credit to Shannon Tindle, use these threes to structure a movie of
repetitive rhythms, like an easy-to-recall bedtime story with exciting incident
and imaginative sights told in a comforting pattern.
In typical Laika fashion, director Travis Knight allows the
movie to move at its own pace, and take on its own distinctive character. It’s
a story of melancholy and loss, with real life-and-death stakes and a reverence
for the fragile line between the living and the dead. An early sequence finds
villagers earnestly communing with the spirits of relatives who’ve passed on.
This makes Kubo jealous, but as his journey brings him closer to memories of
his parents, he draws on their example as well as the inner strength (and
magic) they’ve left in him to do right. This is quite a somber topic for a family film, and
it’s allowed its due seriousness. It informs the movie’s whimsy without
trivializing the ambiguities and mysteries it works through. This is still,
after all, a movie in which a talking monkey has a dazzling swordfight with a
ghostly moon spirit who comes gliding in on spooky CG fog, a sailing ship is
made out of twigs and leaves, and a beetle-man scurries to the top of a giant
skull to pull out a sword imbedded in it. There are magnificent and creative
sights used for quiet, minor key effects. It’s fun, but slower and sadder than
you might expect. It's like a spell. No wonder the movie begins the same way Kubo starts his origami tales, as the paper folds itself into delicate astonishments: "If you must blink, do it now."
