Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 5 December

Kubo and the Two Strings (Knight, 2016)

After an exhaust­ive – and failed – search for some­thing that I once recom­men­ded at this time of year, and that is also avail­able on a stream­ing ser­vice of some descrip­tion, I ended up search­ing the increas­ingly reli­able TVNZ+ for new addi­tions and was reminded of this little ripper.

Stop-motion wiz­ards Laika are owned by the fam­ily that foun­ded Nike – stu­dio boss and Kubo and the Two Strings dir­ect­or Travis Knight is the son of Phil Knight who is now most fam­ous for being played by Ben Affleck in Air – and their track record for weird and won­der­ful fam­ily anim­a­tion is second-to-none for an inde­pend­ent stu­dio. Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls are all easy to recom­mend even if Missing Link from 2019 was a dis­ap­point­ment.

I reviewed Kubo for RNZ back in 2016:

… 17^th Century Japan. Kubo him­self is a young storyteller, busk­ing on the streets of a small coastal vil­lage using his magic­al ori­gami skills to keep the vil­la­gers enthralled des­pite his inab­il­ity to ever fin­ish the story.

He lives in a cave with his trau­mat­ised moth­er – trau­mat­ised by their escape from the clutches of her fath­er, the Moon King, and her sis­ters; an escape that cost Kubo an eye. The Moon King (voiced even­tu­ally by Ralph Fiennes) has nev­er giv­en up on his search and so Kubo must nev­er be out of the cave after dark. Sure enough, because he’s a strong-willed little boy, he stays out after dark and the mys­ter­i­ous masked Sisters (Rooney Mara) are soon hot on his trail.

With the last of her magic, his moth­er trans­ports him to safety along with a talk­ing mon­key and a mute ori­gami samurai as a kind of dir­ec­tion find­er. They must loc­ate three power­ful arte­facts or they are surely doomed.

Despite the beauty of the exe­cu­tion and the power of the story, the num­ber of words it takes to even describe the premise of Kubo is an obstacle at a box office that rewards easy-to-grasp con­cepts like ‘what if your pets had adven­tures while you were at work’ or ‘what if the con­tents of your fridge had adven­tures while you were at work’.

But make no mis­take, Kubo is an extremely fine film that takes its char­ac­ters and its themes ser­i­ously while car­ry­ing humour and adven­ture along for the ride. After their high-tech approach to stop-motion anim­a­tion, Laika’s trade­mark is vocal per­form­ance and all the leads – although the pro­duc­tion has been cri­ti­cised for not cast­ing enough Japanese act­ors – are superb. It is their work that the anim­at­ors are inspired by – and play off – over the years of painstak­ing production.

Where to find Kubo and the two Strings

Aotearoa: Streaming on TVNZ+

Australia: Streaming on Binge

USA: Streaming on Roku (with ads)

UK: Streaming on ITVx