Kubo and the Two Strings

Directed by Travis Knight (2016) ***1/2

The children’s movie market, which decades ago was under served, is awash with product these days. Many of the films are sequels or made quickly and cynically, in the hope that the raunchy jokes and tired slapstick will also fleetingly entertain the teenagers and adults in tow. Well-made animated movies do get made and distributed, though the better ones, unless promoted heavily, are often unable to find an audience. This group includes nearly every Studio Ghibli movie Disney has distributed in the U.S., the French films of Sylvain Chomet, Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli’s A Cat in Paris (2010), Aardman Studio’s Shaun the Sheep Movie and many others, dating back to Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999). Kubo and the Two Strings, a stop-motion film which — at the time of this writing — has earned back only half the money it cost to make, looks to be in this group.

It’s also, mercifully, not a musical. It does feature characters you’ve not seen before, including a memory-impaired mutant Samurai, a boy with great creative powers, but only one eye, and twin evil and floating aunts. Writers Marc Haimes and Chris Butler have created a stock hero’s journey peopled with characters who are specific, flawed and interesting. Though probably too creepy for the youngest set, it should speak to audiences of all ages.

Set in a declining landscape reminiscent of Feudal Japan, Kubo tells the story of that one-eyed boy (Art Parkinson) living on an isolated cliff with his near-catatonic mother (Charlize Theron); she rescued him as a baby from the boy’s grandfather, a sort of Lovecraftian alien presence who wants both revenge and Kubo’s other eye. In the daytime, Kubo makes money giving a presentation in a nearby town, where he uses his three-stringed shamisen to manipulate pieces of paper, telling heroic tales of his dead Samurai father. He’s always been told not to be exposed to the moonlight, but one night …

This is the story of a character who already has little, then seems to lose everything. His only hope for the means to defend himself is a hopeless quest accompanied by a monkey and, eventually, the aforementioned Samurai, Beetle (Matthew McConaughey). Though Kubo and the Two Strings has moments of joy and even much humor (the characters’ facial expressions and body language are priceless), it’s at heart a melancholy tale, with wide vistas on a John Ford scale, many quiet scenes, beautiful details and careful pacing.

Kubo also works on several levels other than just the hero’s quest; it shows some of the complexity and tensions in family relationships. It’s also a rumination on the creative process. Much work went into creating a story about a boy who uses his creative powers to create stories that make sense of his world and predicament. Some stories in Kubo lie; others reveal truth and still others are just flawed, imperfect. Kubo and the Two Strings itself is not a perfect story, but an ambitious and heartfelt one.

I recommend seeing Kubo and the Two Strings while you can. There were maybe five others in the theater when I saw it on a Saturday, so it’s not long for the multiplexes. The previews before the film were a hodgepodge of the sort of animated features I described above, including a truly wretched looking retelling of Robinson Crusoe called, in the U.S., The Wild Life. Stay off that island.

—Michael R. Neno, 2016 Feb 20