I have been on a “quest” lately. Throughout my entire lifetime I’ve been a big movie fan, but most of the time when I go to the pictures I usually see big blockbusters or oscar bait. Recently I’ve been doing my best to see more indie films and films that have a specific niche. Over the summer I saw “Swiss Army Man” by the “Daniels”, and Woody Allen’s annual picture “Cafe Society”. Over the weekend I got the chance to see a new film, a film that in the past I wouldn’t have had a huge interest in. That movie was “Kubo and the Two Strings”, and I’m so glad I saw it.

“Kubo and the Two Strings” is a stop animation film from Laika Entertainment. In the past Laika Entertainment has worked on and produced other stop motion films with “unconventional” stories, such as “Corpse Bride”, “Coraline”, “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls”. While the previous films Laika Entertainment worked on had a “Tim Burton” feel (in fact Burton directed "Corpse Bride"), “Kubo and the Two Strings” is completely different. “Kubo and the Two Strings” focused around the young Kubo. Kubo is on a quest to find three pieces of armor that his late father searched for in order to protect himself from his grandfather, who is out to get his other eye. If it’s not already known by my readers, “Kubo and the Two Strings” takes place in Japan, and focuses a lot on Japanese culture, specifically around samurai's and spirituality. It was a big leap from what Laika Entertainment has worked on in the past, but it was great to see a change.

What makes “Kubo” such an interesting film is the animation style. After hearing the story many people would believe that the film would be animated in the style of a traditional anime. Instead the production company takes a completely different approach. Throughout the film Kubo manipulates the paper in his environment and turns it into magical origami, so to animate the film the art department took large origami figures and used stop motion to animate the film. This style was extremely effective. It put the film in such a beautiful setting, that I frankly wouldn’t think possible with traditional animation.

Now the movie did have a few flaws, that focused mainly around casting. As many film fans and people who follow pop culture know, Hollywood has a big diversity problem. This became extremely evident during the Oscars this year, when for the second year in a row all of the acting nominees were white. A lot of professionals in the film industry agree that this is a big problem, but they feel it has to do less with casting and more with there being very few roles for people with color. Now, while animation might be a completely different beast due to the fact that we only hear the actors and don’t see them I noticed something very interesting in the cast. A large chunk of the cast was played by white Hollywood stars such as Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes and Rooney Mara. However what I think makes the situation worse is that they did cast George Takei and other actors of asian ethnicity, but their roles for so small that when I look back I really don’t remember their characters. Again it might not be as big of a concern since all of the acting deals with voice work, but I feel it would’ve been nice to see (or hear) actors from the culture.

While the movie did have some flaws in the casting, I felt it was a very entertaining picture, that in the past I would’ve probably missed out on due to it not being the particular movie I would’ve wanted to see. So if you’re a movie fan who constantly finds yourself watching the same type of films over and over again, I recommend going out of your “comfort zone”, because you definitely won’t regret it.