Vibe
Kubo is a one-eyed boy who earns coins by telling stories in a seaside village, bringing sheets of paper to life with the music of his shamisen. His performances always stop before the ending because the story he is telling—about his vanished samurai father and his own family—is also the story he does not yet understand. When Kubo accidentally draws the attention of supernatural relatives who have been searching for him, he is sent on a quest with the stern Monkey and the exuberant Beetle to recover a magical suit of armor. Travis Knight’s directing debut turns that adventure into LAIKA’s most sweeping meditation on memory, grief and storytelling. The film moves through snow, ocean, caves, ruined fortresses and moonlit battles without losing the intimacy of a child trying to preserve the people he loves. Its central idea is simple and powerful: stories cannot defeat death, but remembering and retelling can keep a life present. The movie’s extraordinary scale is therefore always tied to something small—a song, a folded piece of paper, a name.
Watch for
- Kubo’s origami performances, where paper becomes movement and storytelling itself becomes a form of magic.
- The contrast between immense physical threats—the giant skeleton, ocean, Moon Beast—and tiny handcrafted objects such as netsuke figures and folded paper.
- How Monkey and Beetle’s comic partnership slowly reveals emotional information about Kubo’s family before the plot states it outright.
- The repeated idea that memory changes people: characters become different depending on which stories they retain, lose or choose to tell.
Production notes
Kubo and the Two Strings marked Travis Knight’s feature directing debut and one of LAIKA’s most technically ambitious productions. The story by Shannon Tindle and Marc Haimes was shaped into a screenplay by Haimes and Chris Butler, while the art department built a stylized fantasy world inspired by Japanese visual traditions. LAIKA stretched the physical scale of stop motion in both directions. The production created a tiny Little Hanzo puppet only a few inches tall, while the giant skeleton became one of the largest articulated stop-motion puppets ever built, standing about sixteen feet high and weighing hundreds of pounds. At the same time, the rapid-prototyping team expanded color 3D printing for facial animation and produced the Moon Beast as a landmark 3D-printed puppet. These innovations supported an unusually fluid range of performances and environments while keeping real materials—paper, cloth, wood, fur, metal and painted surfaces—visible. The result feels epic without abandoning the miniature physicality that gives LAIKA films their particular sense of wonder.
Trivia
- The giant skeleton puppet stood about sixteen feet tall, weighed roughly 400 pounds and had a wingspan of approximately 23 feet.
- Little Hanzo, by contrast, was only about two inches tall, demonstrating the extraordinary scale range the animators worked with on the same production.
- The Moon Beast was a major LAIKA milestone as a 3D-printed stop-motion puppet rather than only a digitally rendered creature.
- Kubo and the Two Strings was nominated for both Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards, an exceptionally rare VFX nomination for an animated film.
- The shamisen is not just a prop: music, rhythm and performance are built into the film’s animation language and Kubo’s ability to animate paper.
Legacy
Kubo and the Two Strings is often treated as LAIKA’s artistic high-water mark because it joins the studio’s miniature craft to genuinely epic visual ambition. Its Academy Award nomination for Visual Effects was especially significant, recognizing that the boundary between animation craft and effects innovation had become unusually porous: enormous practical puppets, replacement-printed faces, digital extensions and compositing all worked together without making the handmade center disappear. The film also crystallized recurring LAIKA themes—children confronting grief, fractured families, stories as survival tools—but expressed them with a lyrical seriousness and scale the studio had not attempted before. Travis Knight’s directing gave the film a strong visual identity while the finale turns the usual fantasy logic inside out: victory ultimately depends less on acquiring armor than on choosing what kind of story to preserve. Kubo remains a benchmark for contemporary stop motion because its technology is difficult to separate from its emotion. The spectacle impresses, but the enduring image is still a child telling a story so that someone will be remembered.