Forgotten Film Friday: Kubo and the Two Strings

A review by Brooks Rich

Only the second animated film covered on the blog. For the most part, animated films are made for kids and I tend to judge them differently from other films. It takes a lot for an animated film to really stand out to me. The ones I sill like are the ones I watched as a kid, Iron Giant, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Secret of Nihm, and generally, I like any original Pixar property. But two animated films in the past five years really blew me away. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and today's film, a wonderful and sadly forgotten film from 2016 called Kubo and the Two Strings.

Kubo is a young one-eyed boy growing up just outside of a small village. Every day he goes into the village and dazzles the locals with his magical shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument. Kubo tells stories and uses the instrument to animate paper. But he never finishes his stories as he has to be home before dark. When his village is attacked by the evil force that took his eye, Kubo sets off with a snow monkey and beetle warrior to avenge his lost eye and save his village.

This film is gorgeous. It's some of the crispest and most inventive animation I've ever seen, a mix between stop motion and computer animation. It's trying to do something different with the animation medium and that's critical for an animated film. Experiment with the medium. Try new things.

It's also refreshing to see an animated film with a completely original story and not riddled with pop culture references, a stigma of the worst animated films out there. The story is heartfelt and we feel for the characters. In my opinion, the standout is the beetle, hilariously voiced by Matthew McConaughey.

I hate that this hasn't caught on and garbage like the Dr. Seuss adaptations, shallow churned out films that lose the magic of the books, are generally the animated films that do well. Sure Pixar can still produce magic if they get away from sequels but I want more films like Kubo, clever animation with stories that aren't just designed to make references to pop culture.

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