Film review: Kubo and the Two Strings
Film & TV
This new stop-motion film about a young boy’s good-versus-evil quest features stunning visuals and astonishing animation – but it’s a little too slick for its own good.
Kubo and the Two Strings is the latest film from stop-motion animation studio Laika. Its first feature, Coraline, was directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) and was imbued with the same slightly gruesome quirkiness and hand-stitched puppet stylistics as the Tim Burton collaborations. It was the sort of animation one hopes will come out of the smaller studios: edgy, eccentric and honest.
Kubo and the Two Strings, a directorial feature-debut from Travis Knight, is an altogether slicker affair. The meticulous production of the stop-motion animation makes it hard to believe it’s not CGI and this is, sadly, to its detriment.
The film is impressive, sure, but despite (or because of) the stunning visuals and intricately manipulated human expressions, it feels a little soulless.
Kubo begins well: there are some beautiful scenes that hint at ancient Japanese woodblock prints, while others pay homage to films such as Crouching Tiger. In the opening scene, Kubo’s mother crosses a stormy sea, battered by Hokusai-style waves, and is eventually washed up on a beach with a shamisen (a Japanese instrument that resembles a lute) and a wriggling bundle of baby.
She and Kubo (Art Parkinson) set up home in a cave, hiding from Kubo’s grandfather (Ralph Fiennes), who has stolen one of Kubo’s eyes and may well come back for the other one.
There’s an interesting East-West dynamic here: the Asian-influenced story and setting are depicted using the more Western-style 3D animation, but picking almost entirely white actors to voice the (entirely Asian) main characters seems, at best, ill-advised.
Occasionally, scenes tingle with quiet understated beauty (Kubo dancing his origami samurai warrior through a rice field; lanterns drifting downriver into the sunset) but more often they shout too loudly about their artistic achievements.
When Kubo sets off on his quest to find a suit of armour that will help him defeat his evil grandfather, the story begins to literally lose the plot in a deluge of platitudes and half-baked characters that even the mind-blowing visuals cannot compensate for.
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By the end of the movie we’re wallowing in Disneyfied schmalz, orchestral crescendos accompanying each vaguely emotional moment, every trite sentimental line: “Hanzo, keep him safe, no matter what.” “I promise I will.” “The end of one story is merely the beginning of another.” “These are the stories of those we have loved and lost and if we hold them in our hearts you will never take them away from us.”
It’s a technically astonishing film, almost genius in its ability to push stop-motion animation to CGI levels of realism, but despite being focused on the importance of telling a good story, it ultimately fails to do so.
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