The movie Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) is a story celebrating the strength of stories. Kubo is a boy with an ill mother, one eye, and a boatload of magic that appears to surprise no one. His other eye? Possessed by this grandfather, who wants them both. Allied with his grandfather are Kubo’s two aunts, flying about in wide brimmed hats and loaded for bear, with a haunting indifference affected by certain Chinese kung fu movies.
Kubo cares for his injured mother, who gives her life to slow down her sisters, those aunts. He is instructed never to be without his monkey charm, later brought to dazzling life by his mother. In the course of their story, they meet an ally encountered along the way, an amnesiac samurai who has been cursed to be a beetle.
And Kubo has powerful magic. Through the instrumentality of his shamisen, the origami paper he carries in his pack becomes flying birds, miniature samurai, a Chinese junk, even a fabulous fire breathing chicken, made at the request of an elderly villager who tells him that the comedy element it brings to his story of a brave warrior will help balance the story.
This advice-giving is echoed throughout the movie. It’s a serious movie, but it has humor as its leavening, and it brings individuality to the characters and spice to the story. Kubo excels in many aspects, but most important is that its core story, the place where everything begins, is a competently, even excellently-crafted story. In some respects this movie could even be viewed as a rebuke to the movie-making industry’s worst excesses, wherein the storyteller is not accorded the time and resources to build the magnificent story necessary to make the visual aspects of the story worthwhile.
The story is good and probably new to American audiences. As Kubo meets and overcomes various barriers, he learns from them; he internalizes those lessons to grow stronger, and perhaps a little wiser. By the time we reach the climactic penultimate scene, we may know what’s coming as the Moon-King makes his appearance, but we’re still anticipating it, and it won’t disappoint the traditionalist.
But there’s the general recognition that stories are composed of substories, and that they are as important as the primary. The beetle’s amnesia, and consequent loss of his personal story, is explicitly acknowledged as a lost story, and a deep personal loss for the beetle. Kubo himself does not exist through some family inheritance, but by working – he’s a story-teller, retelling the stories his mother has told him as she raises him. The movie echoes with the importance of stories to the culture of humanity.
Visually, the movie is a treat. A stop-action CGI movie, it appears as if everything is made of paper, and sometimes this approach is brought front and center. A dream sequence involving the sea is palpably made up of sheets of linked paper, and of course Kubo’s musical origami is also tangibly paper. But it also functions as a double meaning, for those who know the difficulty of origami and compare it to the apparent ease Kubo has in creating his creatures using music; it leads us to wonder just how much practice was necessary for him to reach the level of mastery he has attained. We are allowed to see the magic of a constructed world, from the beauty of paper lamps as they transform into golden herons in flight, to a fearful overhead view of Kubo’s mother sacrificing herself in order to slow her malign sisters.
The music is well considered and presented, as are the voices, including rare appearances by George Takei of Star Trek fame, Ralph Fiennes and Brenda Vaccaro.
All this said, the movie is not perfect. At times the mouths move in very unnatural ways. My Arts Editor and I discussed the possibility that this was purposeful, but were unable to come to a conclusion. The behavior of Kubo in the final battle scene has a certain stereotypical quality to it, as if the visual artists had a deadline and, perhaps, couldn’t quite be as creative as necessary; I refer to the facial expressions as Kubo battles. Defiance is very good, of course, but we’ve seen it a thousand times. Something a little more intriguing would be nice.
I know I’ve harped on characters who exist for the plot, but in this case, even though they do, it’s their very nature to do so, so I didn’t actually mind it. And, in contrast, the villagers are living their lives as disaster overtakes them. The balance and contrast is actually a nice element.
But the story details could have used a little more creativity. Certainly this is context-sensitive. A plot twist used the first time is, assuming it’s effective, innovative; the tenth time, it’s just boring. And we do crave novelty. The movie often achieves novelty through the interplay of the monkey and the beetle, but when Kubo must face his grandfather alone, I found myself hoping that Kubo would not be the defiant youngster with a desperate edge, as all signs were pointing; I literally hoped that his grandfather would appear, expecting a cowed or defiant boy, and instead be met by, “Hello, grandfather. I’ve been hunting you.” When your opponent is stronger and smarter than you, then you must make them think themselves to death. (With apologies to C. J. Cherryh.) And, finally, I was not fully convinced of the plausibility of the motivations of the grandfather. It might have been better to leave those obscure, as in that of the antagonist of No Country For Old Men.
That said, the final scene, wherein the question of just what does one do with a defeated god, is quite creative (and unlikely to be reused). It is a lovely multilayered answer, playing with both the realities of such a situation, and handling it without resort to violence, and, again, a reference to the very nature of story-telling: lying in an attempt to expose a deeper truth (another apology, to V is for Vendetta this time, although I suspect the makers of that movie, or the author of the graphic novel source material, took it from somewhere else).
Strongly Recommended.
