Emotion in Motion: ‘Kubo and the Two Strings,’ ‘Wildwood,’ and Studio Laika

Around 10 years ago (just writing that makes me tear up, time stops for no man, I guess), me and my dad left a rained-out-baseball game early, and were looking for something to do with the rest of our time outside the house. It was then that my dad suggested we see a movie. He asked me for suggestions, and after seeing countless ads on Cartoon Network for a movie about a shamisen (I didn’t know what it was back then, but now I can flex my weeaboo knowledge) playing boy traveling with a monkey and beetle across the world to defeat a great evil, I knew what I wanted to see (“I was obsessed,” as the guy says in the ad countless times). I wanted to see Studio Laika’s “Kubo and the Two Strings.” It’s hard to describe my feelings for this movie, as it is a powerful movie. It’s about a boy, Kubo, traveling the world to collect the three pieces of his defeated samurai father’s gear, the only objects that could defeat Kubo’s uncle.

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