Kubo and the Two Strings Review

Kubo

It’s disheartening how all animated movies are practically the same now. Same style. Same jokes. Same pacing. So the Laika films truly are something special. I love stop-motion animation, after all, and I’m glad there’s at least one studio that still embraces it. I just wish they would hire better writers. Kubo is probably my favorite of their efforts, but it, too, falls victim to lame attempts at humor, forced dialogue, and inconsistent characters. Kubo, for instance, starts out as a very mysterious and soft-spoken boy, but once his adventure begins, and the stakes are significantly higher, he’s suddenly sticking his tongue out and acting immature. Same goes for the monkey character. The more we learn about her, the more her previous actions don’t make much sense.

The adventure itself is fun, though. While it does feel a little video gamey in the sense that Kubo has to find three artifacts before he can defeat the “end boss” (where each artifact is guarded by a mini-boss), I walked into the movie kind of expecting that. Not like Coraline where the game-like finale came out of nowhere. Plus, despite the cast being quite small, all of the characters were very memorable. Bringing in big stars like Matthew McConaughey wasn’t even as distracting as I thought it would be. More importantly, though, is that Laika’s signature animation style is perfect for this type of project. Kubo benefits from stop-motion more than anything else they’ve done. The world feels real and fantastical at the same time, and I really hope they continue down this direction. But they’ve got to up the quality of the writing to match!

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.