This film is Laika's fourth film. From "Ghost Mom" to "The Box Monster", to "Psychic Boy", Laika has always taken a dark and supernatural path. "Kubo and the Two Strings" also ran wildly in this direction.
The immortal family's punishment for this broken man-god couple is strange: memory loss, changes in appearance, and removal of their children's eyes.
The male protagonist is the second generation of human gods, a one-eyed 11-year-old boy. In order to protect his other eye, he came to a strange country in search of armor and the sword of perpetuation. The setting of each scene is imaginative: dinner in the belly of a whale, a boat made of maple leaves, a giant skeleton, a mind-bending one-eyed monster... and amnesia, dreams, eyes, appearance change these elements, making the characters unpredictable , the story is full of mysteries, as if entering the world of David Lynch. When people's memories are unreliable, they can't figure out what's true and what's false; dreams are even more illusory. As soon as a boy dreams, he folds himself into a paper of a villain. The misleading of Yuedi Tuomeng to him makes everything mysterious. test; and most of the characters in the film either appear in real faces, or have been transformed by a spell, or have been enchanted, or wear masks. When a person's memory, dreams and appearance have changed, is he/she still the same person? But what about the contradiction between man and God?
Chinese people like the myth of the love between man and god, perhaps because they feel that the life of the gods is too monotonous and boring, and think that they will definitely envy the family affection in the world. Arranged marriages are destructive, and I feel that if I can fall in love freely, even gods can refrain from doing it. In addition to the theme of love and family, "Kubo and the Two Strings" has also been making a big fuss about memory. Immortals do not grow old, sick and die, and do not suffer. But human beings have memory, family and love, and inheritance makes them stronger than gods.
In addition to the familiar stories, there are many places in "Kubo and the Erxian" that are also familiar: the bizarre world, children grow up independently from their parents, all kinds of magic, amnesia and appearance changes are like Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" ; The little boy hum ah ha shrugs his shoulders and curls his lips and is totally a contemporary American teenager. The director, screenwriter and dubbing are all American, the humor is American, and the theme is American; and the ending song is amazing, Regina Spektor sings an old Beatles song: "When My Guitar Weeps Softly".
In the easter egg at the end, there are several staff members who are manipulating a red skeleton with a height of one person. Like Laika's previous cartoons, "Kubo and the Two Strings" is a stop-motion animation, which means that it is not drawn two-dimensionally, but three-dimensionally made by hand. The scene is an extremely detailed small model. Every action of the characters is moved by human hands, and every expression has to be changed to a different face. In the fast-paced lifestyle of pursuing efficiency in everything, this retro slow-moving and meticulous shooting method is inexplicably moving, and this method can indeed bring people a different look and feel, making the movie dreamy, real, and mysterious. Cute again.
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