TALE OF BOY ON QUEST DELIGHTS
It’s been an unusual summer for animated film.
Finding Dory, landing 13 years after the Pixar original, isn’t your typical fast sequel. Sausage Party, with its restricted rating, is definitely not an average anthropomorphic comedy. And Kubo and the Two Strings, from Laika Entertainment (ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls), isn’t your usual stopmotion animated tale. It’s much, much better. The story, set in medieval Japan but never getting too specific about it, features a oneeyed boy named Kubo (voiced by Game of Thrones’ Art Parkinson) whose magical two-string guitar can cause origami figures to come to life. He uses this power mostly to tell stories to the local villagers, always leaving them wanting more. (A trick more moviemakers should take to heart in their productions.)
Kubo enjoys a measure of fame in the village, but his home life is less happy: His single mother is gripped by a depression that borders on dementia, and she warns Kubo never to stay out after dark, lest the evil, magical Moon King track him down and steal his remaining eye. Three guesses as to what the impetuous lad does late one afternoon.
To escape from or perhaps even defeat the Moon King — who is also his grandfather (family is always embarrassing) — Kubo must now track down a trio of weapons once owned by his late father, all of them bearing mad marketing names like the Helmet Invulnerable and the Armour Impenetrable. There’s also a maternal, magical mon- key (Charlize Theron) whose straight-man (straight-monkey?) role sets up much of the movie’s droll humour.
I’m going to take my cue from the film’s language and declare Kubo’s storyline the Plot Phenomenal, backed by the Casting Inspired — Matthew McConaughey minus his Southern drawl plays a warrior in a Kafkaesque predicament (he’s a giant beetle) — and the Effects Incomparable. The stop-motion puppetry provides a sense of weight to the characters, and the origami magic is stunning.
Half dream, half nightmare and completely original, Kubo and the Two Strings is a story that will amaze and delight. And although I don’t expect a sequel, this is one rare time where I wouldn’t mind the original being the Film Penultimate.