Review - Kubo and the Two Strings

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not a return to full reviews for me, I'm afraid. Just an exercise to shake some of the rust off. It'll be back to capsules for awards season movies.

In a bustling village square, in some unnamed era of pre-Imperial Japan, a boy wearing an eye-patch and a baggy samurai robe drops a pile of paper on the ground and strums a power chord on his shamisen. As though by instinct, the crowd turns, silences, and gathers 'round with barely-contained excitement.
“If you must blink, do it now,” instructs Kubo (for that is his name), literally commanding the attention of his audience.

As he plucks the strings and taps harmonic on his instrument, his paper springs to life, folding itself into intricate figurines that run, jump, fly and do pantomimed battle with each other, acting out the drama as Kubo narrates a tale of adventure and heroism for the delighted onlookers.

We are (shrewdly) given no explanation of this sorcery, and honestly, we're too bedazzled to care. Just like the throng of villagers rapt by Kubo's paper players, when we sit down to a Laika feature we are being treated to the most elaborate puppet show ever imaginable. Or at least until Laika – the stop-motion animation studio behind this thrilling illusion – imagines a way to make it more yet elaborate for their next trick.

My Award nominations: Animated Feature

Didn't think it was the strongest year for animation all around, but there was lots of variety of technique upon which to feast the eyes. My five Best Animated Features nominees are:

Review - ParaNorman

Taking cues from their own deliciously creepy Coraline from 2009, the animation studio Laika Entertainment serves up another stop-motion spooker for kids, the often charmingly macabre ParaNorman.

Kodie Smit-McPhee (The Road) voices the spiky-haired misfit Norman, a low-key loner with a peculiar knack for communicating with the dead. Maligned and tormented by his peers and even family, Norman escapes their harsh judgments by watching cheap zombie flicks and indulging in conversations with his late grandmother. His sixth sense may cause him troubles, but it comes in handy when an ancient witch's curse raises a septet of pilgrim corpses from the grave, and only he has the ability to stop it.