Kubo and the Two Strings review

Laika studios, the animation studio based in Portland Oregon, has built its brand recognition on a style of detail oriented and highly stylized stop-motion puppetry. Their features, “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” and “The Boxtrolls,” have primarily catered to the same audience who followed “Coraline” director Henry Selick from Disney’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” which shares a similar gothy aesthetic. In contrast, Laika’s latest project “Kubo and the Two Strings” is less interested in introverted protagonists and macabre dark comedy and is more concerned with widening the scope and visual boundaries of their storytelling with an eastern-themed, mythic adventure.

The film interweaves an intricate story-within-a-story that purposely blurs the lines between depictions of imagination and actual magic. The movie follows the multi-faceted coming of age of Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson), a young boy who lost an eye as an infant and who lives with his mother on the top of a Japanese mountain that overlooks a small village. His shut-in mother encourages him to mingle with the others during the daytime hours, but warns her son to return home before dark. While visiting, he relays the bits and pieces of his mother’s stories/memories for the townsfolk in the form of origami puppet shows, created and directed by the music of his rudimentary three-stringed guitar. One day after staying out too late, Kubo is visited by his mother’s evil sisters (voiced by Rooney Mara) who wish to claim him as their own. Their sudden arrival forces the boy into perusing an Odyssey to find three pieces of a magic armor. Once collected he hopes to destroy the evil Moon King; the mysterious and dark magician who’s most likely responsible for his mother’s sudden disappearance. In her place, Kubo is joined by an enchanted and overly-protective Monkey (Charlize Theron) and a charming Beetle samurai (Mathew McConaughey) with a lot of hard-headed courage.

Fans of Japanese entertainment will likely see in “Kubo” shades of the sensitive fantasies that Hayao Miazaki produced with Studio Gibli, as well the airy and patient pacing of Japan’s classic edo-period action cinema. Elements of the plot also recalls the structure and archetypal symbolism of “The Wizard of Oz.”

The animation exhibited here is by far the most ambitious and expansive work we’ve seen from Laika thus far, and the movie’s camera technique and its consideration of the frame allows for wider shots and wilder pans and zooms than previously implemented in their painstaking form of animation. On a technical level, It’s nearly impossible not to give into director Travis Knight’s vision, even if the ending is clumsy and screenplay’s vague mythology sometimes muddles its themes.

This story is interested in familial legacy, adopted communities, and what it’s like to grow up without a sense of personal history, while simultaneously trying to overcome an unwanted path set before you, but the film sometimes struggles in tying all of these ideas together in succinct and assured way. The team behind this project surly deserves much praise for creating a product for children that is thoughtful and contemplative while also beautifully crafted and creatively art-directed. With that said, admiration doesn’t always translate into a full immersion. “Kubo and the Two Strings” is a significant progression for this studio and it’s more than worthy of your attention but as a story it merely nudges the shoulders of greatness.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal - Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Kubo and the Two Strings."

Boxtrolls review

                “Boxtrolls,” the most recent film by Laika Films (creators of “Coraline,” “9,” and “ParaNorman”) is a wonderfully detailed political parable, keeping the faith in painstaking stop-motion animation and model-work. It’s an ambitious effort both in practical execution and narrative scope, as it tries to connect many different levels of satire, storytelling and complicated subtext. However, while never failing to keep you dazzled visually, it loses some connection with the audience as it moves around quickly to keep all its plates spinning in the air.

                The story seems to take place in an alternate turn of the century Britain, where the currency is cheese and the economic classes are denoted by the colors of each individual’s hat—the poor wear red top hats, while the rich wear white. The ruler of the town of Cheesebridge, Lord Portley-Rind (Jarred Harris), is out of touch with the working class, concerned only for his cheese fortune, leaving his daughter Winnie (Elle Fanning) emotionally uncared for as well.  Unbeknownst to him, a treacherous worker named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsly) plans to leverage his way up to the white-hat level by faking the disappearance of an inventor’s child, throwing him to the mysterious under-dwellers of the city known as the Boxtrolls. They’re peaceful enough, only wanting to take human trash to build neat-looking, gear-oriented devices out of it, but in order for Snatcher to lead a culture war, he needs a social boogieman to keep the town’s people afraid. He then makes a deal with the village leadership to capture and destroy all of the monstrous Boxtrolls, in exchange for his promotion. Twelve years later, the human boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), affectionately renamed Eggs, has been raised to live as a Boxtroll, where he occasionally takes trips to the surface to steal garbage for the survival. After Snatcher arrests a member of his adopted family, with the help of the Lord’s precocious daughter, he ventures above-ground to uncover the grand conspiracy. 

                There’s a lot to admire in the details of this complicated world-building. The design of every individual character, as well as the city and environments they inhabit, is meticulously conceived; not only because of the difficult nature of stop-motion animation, but in the graphic consideration of every shot and every prop and every piece of clothing and how it all culminates to occupy every frame of the motion picture.  With its dynamic camera set-ups, moody lighting and fluid action set-pieces, this film constantly reminds you how far this art form has come since the days of Gumby. Technically speaking, Laika is miles ahead of their competition, providing a warm humanity and tactility that modern CGI animation just can’t replicate. 

                Unfortunately, the story isn’t as methodically executed. Though things move along fine enough and the allegories concerning class warfare, political deception, and the ‘othering’ of stigmatized minorities are dealt with in intelligent and entertaining ways, the emotional component lacks, largely because Eggs, our hero, is undefined and underwritten. He’s a boy raised as a monster and learns halfway through the film that he was adopted by a different species, and that’s a lot for any character to go through in 90 minutes, but in this film revelations are treated only as motivators to make him pass from one set piece to another. He’s too vague to root for, and though his partnership with the slightly more entertaining Winnie character is occasionally heartfelt, his role is primarily only fulfilling as the audience’s cypher through this world. Lucky for us, this world is pretty damn neat to look at—filled with creatures, drag-queens, and steam-punk, humanoid mech-tanks—and though the subtext should never drive the story, at least it keeps things interesting, even if we feel a little distant from (and occasionally bored with) our protagonist’s personal journey.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2014