If you must blink, do it now. Pay careful attention to everything you see, no matter how unusual it may seem. If you look away, even for an instant, then our hero will surely perish. It’s time to follow my own path. My name is Kubo. This is my story.
Kubo
To craft a meaningful animated feature is a feat nothing short of momentous. For Laika, a studio lauded for its strict adherence to stop-motion, filmmaking is Herculean.
Previously dabbling in a broader spectrum of art, Laika promptly narrowed its focus with the gambit that was Coraline in 2009. The Neil Gaiman adaptation solidified their prominence and reaffirmed the narrative engagement of stop-motion itself. It was as if the actual weight of the armatures used in their production somehow carried an emotional weight more tangible than the characters brewed strictly through CGI. The time needed for each film, an apparent minimum of three years between outings, seems to bring Laika closer to the stories they delicately tell. This is epitomized and realized in no film better than their fantasy epic, Kubo and the Two Strings.
The fourth film of Laika proper, Kubo is both a reflection of the studio’s art and a premonition of what stop-motion is capable of. Director Travis Knight’s guidance proves critical to this end, as his position as Laika’s CEO kept him at a mild distance from the filmmaking itself, but nonetheless familiar with what their unique endeavor can yield. Thus, Kubo is a film not only concerned with the power of storytelling but is quite literally propelled by it. The film is an embodiment of how storytelling melds generations and channels culture, creating a world where music, and more viscerally a form of stop-motion art, is its vehicle.
Not unlike two of Laika’s previous pieces, the film’s didactic is tethered to its titular figure. Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a young musician struggling to care for his fading mother (Charlize Theron), her brief moments of lucidity only emerging to warn the child of the dangers of extended family, specifically the grandfather who took one of the boy’s eyes as an infant. What his mother was able to disseminate to Kubo, however, was the ability to animate origami through a magical Shamisen. He has a knack for captivating an audience, which he parleys into donations from a nearby village to sustain and veil his mother. Unfortunately, Kubo is not aware at the film’s onset that the tale he performs over and over again is both closely related to his own origin and tragically incomplete. Kubo warns the townsfolk, “our hero will surely perish” should they “blink,” the protagonist has been rendered involuntarily blind to his own trajectory.
Kubo’s distance to his own art alienates him, spurring feelings of stagnation as he grows resentful of his absent and presumably late father and hero of his performance, Hanzo. While his aptitude is undeniable, his practice has grown routine and more so a source of reluctance rather than empowerment. He is framed within the town as a peculiar sideshow, unable to even take part in the community’s celebrations and ritual due to the threat of his monstrous aunts. A moment of desperation and frustration finds Kubo struggling to communicate with father, and his aunts descend upon him as the moon rises. In an instant, the village, his mother, and his redundancy is lost, as a brief cataclysm births the genesis of his own narrative. Just as Laika gambled on the success of Coraline through a strict adherence to stop-motion, Kubo’s inclination to venture beyond what is known and safe yields something uncertain and grander.
In the film’s second act, the composition of Kubo’s stories and understanding move from basic tools to symbols of heightened meaning. Immediately notable is the charm he carried with him, a monkey carving which has transformed into a fleshed-out character reminiscent of his mother. Though the carving of the monkey may have vaguely alluded to her, emitting a sense of safety and comfort, it lacked the exchange and interaction present in a living character. The emergence of Monkey likewise signifies the arrival of what Kubo has desperately sought, unbeknownst to him; her presence represents the ability to incorporate one’s own experiences into their fiction.
As his journey progresses, each subsequent character Kubo encounters is another step forward in his burgeoning storytelling prowess. With the introduction of Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), Kubo dabbles in subverting expectation. It is of no surprise Beetle is strikingly-reminiscent of Hanzo, the protagonist of Kubo’s past performances. Further, the journey he takes, a quest to secure three legendary artifacts and defeat the Moon King, parallels his old story nearly verbatim. However, it when examining identity, such as with the amnesic Beetle, does his storytelling begin to emerge. Though the character is essential as a capable Hanzo in pure martial ability, he is aloof, painfully stoic to the point of self-parody, and often hamstrung by a lack of executive function. Whereas the rather simple tale of Hanzo and its lack of finality conveyed a sense of weakness in Kubo’s writing, Beetle’s lack of intent is instead used to bolster an internal conflict and, more importantly, aid in Kubo’s understanding of individual complexity. Stories carry little weight on their heroes. They are bilateral machines striving against evil in of itself. Rather, they require contemplation and conflict not only externally, but philosophically and emotionally.
In contrast with what Kubo has learned so far, the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) is an agent of simpler and linear storytelling. The initial conversation Kubo has with his grandfather dissects narrative as a means to an end as he cites Kubo’s destiny, to ascend to the heavens as a fellow god, as a straightforward tale devoid of nuance. To the Moon King, things are simply as they are, and any emotional struggle or character introspection is a needless tangent to the conclusion of the tale. He may concede to the point of narrative in the sparsest, mythological sense, but he fails to understand more than a single dimension of growth and triumph. Kubo’s protest to preserve his remaining eye and connection to humanity is an analogy for choosing to peer deeper into what makes a figure organic and experimenting with what causes the narrative to resonate. In fact, the artifacts Kubo has gathered throughout the film prove useless of themselves, but Kubo finds the overt aspects of an epic, such as a slaying a giant skeleton, to prove more superficial should it not parley into cognitive growth.
It is in the film’s climactic battle and its notably less combative height that Laika takes a stand against traditional storytelling. Awe-inspiring set pieces, such as those often wielded in a Laika production are enticing, but only for a fleeting moment. Without the context brought by real, down-to-earth struggles and the characters they involved, the most striking aspects of the studio’s craft are lost. Kubo is a reminder for Laika that though stop-motion animation is an exceptional vehicle, it will do nothing but gather dust without the fuel of a narrative.
