KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS: THE BEST ANIMATION OF 2016!
The world of animated features occasionally feels homogenous, filled with films cut from the same, Pixar-infused cloth and produced for the same audience — even when they are excellent movies deserving of the accolades they receive.
And then there’s Laika, the studio responsible for such wonderfully quirky, awesome stop-motion animated films such as 2009’s Coraline (an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s story of the same name), the criminally under-appreciated ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls. All three films earned the studio well-deserved Academy Award nominations. And then the studio brought its latest film to theaters, Kubo and the Two Strings – and it has to be Laika’s best feature so far.
Kubo and the Two Strings follows a magnificent young boy named Kubo (Art Parkinson) in ancient Japan with a gift for storytelling. When his mysterious past comes back to threaten everything he holds dear, he’s forced to embark on a magical quest to recover a powerful set of armor and defeat his evil grandfather (Ralph Fiennes). Kubo is joined on his journey by a fiercely protective monkey (Charlize Theron) and an overgrown, amnesiac beetle trained as a samurai (Mathew Mcconaughey).
From the film’s opening moments to its end credits, Kubo and the Two Strings is a beautiful visual masterpiece that boasts some of the most meticulously detailed set pieces and sequences of any animated feature in many a year, stop-motion or otherwise. There’s a texture to everything that happens in the world of Kubo that simply doesn’t exist in most traditional or digitally animated projects, and rather than distract from the story (or worse, make it feel puppet-like, as some stop-motion projects do), it gives the characters an impressive depth both literally and emotionally which creates such a heartfelt story.
The voice cast is also a good fit for the story, with Game of Thrones actor Art Parkinson (who plays young Rickon Stark) bringing the perfect dose of emotion to his performance as Kubo. The way he makes you feel about an animation is surreal, Parkinson’s work is particularly praiseworthy for how well he carries the character in the company of co-stars Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey, who voice the aptly named Monkey and Beetle, respectively. All three actors – especially Theron and McConaughey – do a nice job of inhabiting their characters and giving them a sense of authenticity that demands more than simply reading lines of dialogue, and the film is so much better for it.
Among the supporting cast members, Rooney Mara and another one of my favourites Ralph Fiennes both effectively raise the threat level of their respective villain characters with their exceptional voice work, and George Takei’s relatively brief cameo – you’ll know it when you hear it – succeeds in providing a funny moment that avoids taking you out of the story.
Like each of Laika’s animated features before it, Kubo serves as a nice reminder that stop-motion animation still has a lot more to offer the modern movie audience. This time around, however, the movie makes a strong case for being the best way to tell certain kinds of stories.
Laika has a knack for telling stories that draw you in and offer you something different than the tales being told elsewhere, and in that way, the studio has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of Kubo and the Two Strings. A triumph as both an animated feature and a showcase of what stop-motion animation can bring to a story, Kubo and the Two Strings is the latest in a long line of great features to come out of Laika – and for me is the best to date hence why I'm making this my favourite animation of 2016 with a 10/10. Must see!
Comments
Post a Comment