As impressed as I was by Kubo and the Two Strings, I could not help feeling a bit disjointed by the end of the movie. It was a beautifully animated epic adventure, yet I did not feel stirred by it the way I was by other such stories. What was the missing note?
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that while Kubo was a good story, it was not a great story — and what it was missing was a cohesive theme. Kubo says a lot about stories and memories and family, but it fails to tie them together into a narrative whole. There are numerous opportunities to tie them together that get ignored, and at the end of the movie, the viewer is left disappointed that these individual instruments did not come together. Worse, one gets the feeling that this could have been accomplished had more time been spent in polishing the script, making the lost opportunities more disappointing. The pieces are there — Kubo's Paper Master powers, the stories from the villagers, the ancestor's toro nagashi lanterns, the characters' various memory issues — but while they play in parallel, they remain forever apart, like the strings of the shamisen.
Then again, it is as Kubo himself says: this was a happy story. But... it could still be a whole lot happier.
A Story Out of Tune
As impressed as I was by Kubo and the Two Strings, I could not help feeling a bit disjointed by the end of the movie. It was a beautifully animated epic adventure, yet I did not feel stirred by it the way I was by other such stories. What was the missing note?
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that while Kubo was a good story, it was not a great story — and what it was missing was a cohesive theme. Kubo says a lot about stories and memories and family, but it fails to tie them together into a narrative whole. There are numerous opportunities to tie them together that get ignored, and at the end of the movie, the viewer is left disappointed that these individual instruments did not come together. Worse, one gets the feeling that this could have been accomplished had more time been spent in polishing the script, making the lost opportunities more disappointing. The pieces are there — Kubo's Paper Master powers, the stories from the villagers, the ancestor's toro nagashi lanterns, the characters' various memory issues — but while they play in parallel, they remain forever apart, like the strings of the shamisen.
Then again, it is as Kubo himself says: this was a happy story. But... it could still be a whole lot happier.