My 27 movie A-Z film-a-thon: Day 12
This era of animated films contains many clunkers.
Okay, that’s a little unfair. It doesn’t just apply to animated films, but to almost any large, big-budget or franchise movie from 2016 to 2019. Scripts from this time often offered nothing new—or if they did, it felt like the result of throwing darts at a wall.
Kubo and the Two Strings is creative, yes, but also absolute nonsense. Nothing here is grounded in reality. Kubo can control origami by playing a magical shamisen—but where did that power come from? The movie isn’t interested in asking, or answering, that question. Compare this to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, where every surreal moment still feels rooted in something emotionally familiar. In Kubo, things just… happen. Every minute, it feels like another random idea is yanked from a grab bag and dropped into the script with little development or organic integration.
The animation is impressive, considering the budget, but the character models are oddly generic. Everyone seems to have Gru’s face shape from Despicable Me, and the animation feels a little “floaty”—there’s not much weight when characters fly or step. Not a dealbreaker, but noticeable.
More frustrating is how little the film resembles the culture it supposedly draws from. Set in early feudal Japan, Kubo features no Asian voice actors in key roles, and everyone speaks in a flat, stereotypically American tone. Why build a story around such a specific cultural setting, only to strip it of that culture in execution?
In the end, it’s a jumble: generic animation, generic music, a scattershot script that relies on its uniqueness of ideas rather than their development. Worst of all, the movie constantly tells instead of shows. Kubo is sent away with his mother’s magic, then wakes in a snowy field next to a talking monkey—who was once a wooden charm named Monkey. “I said, your mother is gone. Your village is destroyed! Burned to the ground!” Monkey yells. Would’ve been nice to see that scene, right?
Kubo and the Two Strings isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it’s rather engaging, and refreshingly distinct in a sea of interchangeable animated films. It’s just… this could have been so much more in the right hands. I enjoyed it—even though I found something to complain about in every scene.
6.5/10
Avidavr: Media Reviews 