With dark bangs draped over an eyepatch, a stack of colorful origami paper, and a two-stringed, lute-like instrument called a shamisen strapped to his back, young Kubo heads into a seaside village to put on a street performance for spare change. As he rocks the shamisen like the Joe Satriani of ancient Japan, the origami paper dances to life around him, folding into sharply edged characters and objects, and occasionally bursting into ribbons of confetti. He tells the legend of a great samurai warrior named Hanzo and the evil force that takes many forms in an effort to take him down. Kubo holds the villagers rapt, but inevitably disappoints them. He doesn’t know how the story ends. It will be his quest to find out.
“If you must blink, do it now” are the first words spoken in Kubo and the Two Strings, a line that doubles as a primer and a brag about the abstract wonders to come. The film is asking the audience to accept every off-the-wall premise that it’s given, up to and including a shamisen that can part a tidal wave or making origami figures dance like the runaway mops in Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” There’s a strong internal logic to the dense mythology it creates, but first the barriers between life and death, reality and fantasy, and past and present must come down. In the magical world of Kubo, these walls are transformed into pathways.
The fourth and, to date, best film from Laika, the Portland-based animation house responsible for Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings has more in common with the serene eccentricities of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away) than American brands like Disney/Pixar, Blue Sky Studios, or Illumination Entertainment. Though the tactility and dimension of its 3D stop-motion process sets Laika apart, Kubo has a specific faith that younger viewers will readily accept a world that has nothing in common with their own, save for the yearning of a child to complete his story and understand who he is.
Simply stated, the film is about Kubo’s quest to locate three items that will help protect him from the wrathful Moon King: the Sword Unbreakable, the Armor Impenetrable, and the Helmet Invulnerable. And it’s important to hold onto that basic goal, because the particulars of his adventure resist tidy description. Living in a rock cave with his sick mother, Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson) discovers a terrible vendetta against them from his evil aunts, who appear like black-shroud ghosts in a Japanese horror picture, and the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), his grandfather, who plucked out his eye as an infant and wants to claim the other one, too. (Another expectation of younger viewers: They’ll be able to withstand a little darkness.)