Kubo and the two strings review

What a spectacular movie. Lets focus first on the story itself. We open with a young woman adrift in a tumultuous sea. The raging waters and stormy clouds try and yank her down into a watery grave but her iron will and magical disposition saves her momentarily. Eventually, the seas prove too strong and shes pulled below with a sickening crack of her skull. Dragging herself along a beach, face cut and body broken, we see that she wasnt the only passenger on the ill fated boat. A young child was wrapped securely in a red robe is her reason for fleeing.

We open several years later with young kubo, the wrapped baby by the sea and his mom living in a cave facing the very ocean that tried to swallow them whole. What tranpires after that is a magical story about story telling and the magic that transpires in the words of a heroic tale. The story itself is a story. A story kubo is told as a boy by his mom and that he retells as well to local villagers. The movie becomes a living representation of what it means to remember and to retell the grand stories of our lives. Kubo is a story teller by trade, his magic is the ability to control paper and other objects to help advance the tale. A very simple but powerful allegory of how stories take on a different life to the reader/viewer. Its kubos life and history and we are the viewers sharing it with him while being told it. There are several moments where characters, upon worrying about their own demise, are reassured by realizing that our deaths are inevitable, that all stories have an end, but there may not be an end in their retelling. We live on in the words and memories of those who care to know our stories.

The performances in this movie were great with, spolier free i promise, characters with very subtle traits that really make sense after you reflect on the story later. The beetle night is the righteous hero with no memory and the monkey is the protective and somewhat cold protector. Their roles quickly change as the tale unfolds and the are played with such sincerity. Every character in story is played so well.

The animation though is so breath taking its almost distracting. The bulk of the sets and the entirety of the characters are hand crafted by some of the best artists in the game. The massive skeleton they do battle with was real and the post credits sequence really shows off the talent and skill of these folks and the beauty they created.