Disappointingly, almost unwatcheably unintelligent nonsense that, while it does introduce some interesting new animation techniques to the format that are worth a few moments to respect, is simply unable to create anything resembling an actual story along with any of what's necessary to tell it.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Somehow this film has gotten very favorable reviews. One wonders how this could be possible. The film begins with a promise to be a poetic story inside a story (perhaps inside a story), an unconventional animation to follow in the footsteps of greats like Ratatouille, The Croods, or Rango, to keep a short list—animations that transcended their genre, introducing not only new techniques to represent aspects of reality in its artificial form, but also expanded the possibilities for story-telling in a medium limited practically only by the imagination. However, while the film does introduce some new technical elements in the form of a kind of hyper-realism in the context of stylized drawings (creating the effect of reality surrounded by fantasy) and an exaggeration of movement that accelerates and decelerates certain motions in a modified kind of stop-motion to give them the effect of the unpredictability of human motion, the film is crippled by its completely unintelligent and desperate attempt to be funny in every moment. The monkey, the beetle, Kubo himself, every character is written in the form of an always obvious self-reflexivity that very quickly becomes tired and repetitive ('I'm a monkey so I have 10-times more sensitive smell' as they enter a dead whale carcass; 'look with your eyes—err, eye I mean' to the one-eyed Kubo; 'the monkey doesn't like it, and not just because he's a monkey!'...over and over and and over...). Furthermore, the plot, which seemed to promise to be a complex doubled narrative, turns out to be like watching voices that have been added to predefined and unchangeable movements. Every situation is drained of urgency, every ostensibly precarious moment is obviously on the cusp of simple (and really silly) resolution, with much of it taking on the feeling of 'boss fights' in a Nintendo video game (e.g. the stumbling skeleton or the eyes in the sea and the fight in the ship above). And when the story appears to be falling apart, it is almost automatically reconstituted by Kubo's two strings...

So, the point is: that while this animation might be entertaining for a very young child, it is not in any way the kind of genre expanding effort it represents itself as, or as other critics have hailed it, seemingly almost reflexively, based on a very superficial look designed to perpetuate, undoubtedly, a studio's marketing hype. All that said, it's admittedly never nice to deconstruct a friendly looking children's movie.