Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Kubo and the Two Strings
2016 · Travis Knight · Kubo and the Two Strings on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how figures are lit against sky, snow, or water. (light)
Passingham repeatedly isolates characters in silhouette and rim-light against wide, empty fields, from the village square to the snowfield.
Payoff: This drains the landscape into pure feeling instead of action. In the reading: any-space-whatever (emptiness). The snow-white spaces stop functioning as settings for action, becoming what the reading calls an any-space-whatever, pure feeling.
Listen for the shamisen driving the origami's movement. (sound)
Marianelli ties his score so closely to Kubo's playing that the music becomes the action, not just its backdrop.
Payoff: Score and story fuse into one act instead of remaining separate. In the reading: symbol. The shamisen works as what the reading calls a symbol, an object condensing the film's whole system of bonds.
Notice how still Monkey holds her body between lines. (performance)
Charlize Theron's Monkey moves rarely and precisely; her stillness reads as restraint and sorrow rather than blankness.
Payoff: Stillness carries feeling because a real puppet, not a drawing, holds the pose. In the reading: expressionism. The reading calls this expressionism: matter that is not alive and not inert, carrying feeling in itself.
Listen to the opening line spoken straight to you. (structure)
The film opens with direct address and returns often to storytelling itself as its organizing act.
Payoff: It marks the whole quest as a told tale, not a report of fact.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the paper. Every fold is a real hand moving real matter, twenty-four times a second.