Originally posted at the DL August 2016
Everything about this has such personality. The puppets, the characters, the cast, the nature of the tale and the form gods and magic take. It has this distinct feel of authenticity, in a way I don't think I've gotten out of many stories over the years, while still being unmistakably itself.
Kubo achieves that sweet spot: it is unmistakably in the form of a classical myth yet still feels like a human, lived-in story in the moment.
I could just gush about that first storyteller sequence. Paper Hanzo gets across so much personality, and the way the paper moves to both create the monsters he fights and how it disassembles as he dispatches them is great. And of course the old lady was right. Bring on the fire-breathing chicken.
The great thing with Paper Hanzo is he's pretty distinct from Beetle, but at the same time I'm kinda kicking myself for being blindsided by that reveal. Paper Hanzo is totally trying to get him to put two and two together and I never picked up on it until after the fact.
(Unlike Monkey where sometime right after the mosquito incident I went "wait a tick")
They also have a hook that might as well have been written for me. There's an unstated conceit that magic and the gods function on narrative. Playing a song calms the tides, animates paper, let's a woman return to some semblance of life despite crippling brain damage. And what is a story without an audience? Don't look away for even a second, or our hero will surely perish.
And what wins the day? Kubo changes the story. His grandfather stole his eye... and now, he uses that eye to see the world he was blinded to. He joins humanity and sees it through the same eyes as his oh-so human grandson. Literal because, y'know, of course it is.
Rating- 9/10. Y'know, my feeling coming out of the theater was more of an 8/10, but writing this out my estimation has gone up.
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