Kubo and the Two Strings · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy sits down in front of his village, tilts a shamisen across his lap, and plucks one string. A square of paper stands up off the ground and folds itself into a samurai. No hands touch it. It acts out the tale while the boy tells it, and the villagers lean toward him the way people lean toward a fire.

Hold that image, because the whole film is inside it, including the trick it is playing on you. Paper appears to move by itself because on a soundstage in Oregon someone moved it by hand, a fraction of an inch, photographed it, and moved it again. Twenty-four times for one second of screen life.

Deleuze opens his cinema books with an argument borrowed from Bergson, and it turns out to be the argument Kubo is quietly making. Older thought grasped movement through privileged instants: the posed, essential form, the discus-thrower at the top of his turn, one attitude standing in for the whole motion. Cinema broke with that. It takes movement by sampling it at equidistant, indifferent moments — the any-instant-whatever, no frame more meaningful than the one beside it, because a machine took them all at the same rate without choosing. That indifference is the modern condition of the moving image, and it is exactly what Laika's method refuses. Every frame of this film is a pose someone decided on: a limb set by hand, a face lifted off and replaced from a library of 3D-printed components — the system Coraline invented, ParaNorman pushed into full color and fine gradation, and Kubo scaled to a combinatorial range no sculptor could hand-carve in clay. A week of one animator's labor buys a few seconds. Then the projector runs those chosen instants at the indifferent rate, and they read as ordinary continuous motion. The uncanny weight of the film comes from that collision: privileged instants disguised as any-instants, decisions passing themselves off as physics. It's why Monkey's stillness registers as sorrow rather than as animation shorthand.

Travis Knight is worth naming here. Lead animator on the earlier Laika features, directing for the first time, he spent that authority on slowness: Murrie's cut gives the quiet grief between Kubo and Monkey the same standing as the skeleton fight.

There's a Bazinian bonus here. Bazin loved photography because the thing was actually in front of the lens: the image is a trace, not a drawing. Stop-motion keeps that contract while lying about everything else. The giant skeleton of the Hall of Bones, the largest puppet the studio ever built, was really rigged, really lit, really there. Ray Harryhausen's sword-fighting skeleton in Jason and the Argonauts is the direct ancestor; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the grandparent, where Dynamation composited a hand-animated giant into action at human scale. Kubo keeps that old bargain with a modern pipeline — practical puppets on built sets, digitally extended and cleaned, the invisible-seam method The Boxtrolls consolidated and Steve Emerson carried forward. An animated film nominated for Best Visual Effects is a strange sentence. The strangeness is the point. What got recognized was photography.

Because the objects are real, their aliveness is uncanny in a precise Deleuzian sense. He reserves expressionism for the shadow-gradient tradition where things carry a non-organic life: matter that isn't alive and isn't inert either. Passingham lights the film that way, high-contrast, silhouette and rim-light, figures cut against snow and sky and water. The Sisters glide behind their masks, built out of voice and armature and animation at once, and register as things that move rather than as people who do. Those wide pale fields also do something Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever in its empty variant: space drained of coordinates until it stops working as a setting for action and becomes pure feeling. The film borrows the negative space of woodblock printing to get there, but the snow is a real surface under real light, so the emptiness has weight instead of flatness.

Now the origami. Kubo folds a paper samurai, Little Hanzo, tells its story, and the figure goes on ahead of him into the quest. Deleuze has a name for that operation: crystalline description, where a description composes its own object and then replaces it, until you can't separate the account from the thing. Kubo tells a story about his father's armor; the telling sends him after the armor; the paper man he folded leads the search. That isn't decoration. It's the studio's own method promoted to plot, and it's inseparable from what Deleuze calls fabulation — a character caught in the act of legending, making a story that makes the people in it real. The film opens with a storyteller talking straight at us. If you must blink, do it now. It never steps outside that frame.

Which changes what the adventure is. On the surface this is clean action architecture: three pieces of armor, a vector zig-zagging between disconnected worlds — village, snowfield, the Garden of Eyes, the hall of bones — each object won disclosing more of a situation that was hidden from the first minute. But nothing is finally settled by a blow. The late revelation about who the companions are turns the quest inward, and the past it uncovers never arrives as a dated flashback. Deleuze would call that difference sheets of past: not a memory inserted into the present, but a past you move through as terrain. One companion can't remember who he was. Another carries a sorrow she doesn't explain. The mother is fading while the story is still being told. You don't retrieve this past; you walk around inside it, and the armor is less an artifact than a stratum.

The shamisen holds the whole system together as a symbol, an object that condenses a film's organizing relation. Marianelli binds the score to it so tightly that Kubo's playing is simultaneously the music and the action, which collapses the usual wall between what we hear and what happens. Two strings, two bonds. Then a Beatles cover over the credits about a guitar that grieves.

What did the film do to the art? Not a revolution in form. Something rarer. The Nightmare Before Christmas proved armatures could sustain a feature, and Laika proved a studio could live there full-time. Kubo proved the medium could carry adult grief at epic scale, in a market that had written handmade animation off as a novelty act. Then it underperformed commercially, which is also part of what it means. Its forward influence is still being written; what's certain is that it remains the best exhibit in the argument.

Here's the question it leaves open. The film's whole wager is that you can feel the hand in the image, that patience survives into the finished frame as feeling. Watch it once for the story. Then watch one gesture of Monkey's and ask whether you'd have felt the labor if nobody had told you it was there. Either answer is interesting. The film is betting you would.