By Gill Pringle
Kubo And The Two Strings, the new 3D stop-motion animated feature from Focus Features and much loved animation production house, Laika (the team behind Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls) is set in ancient Japan (or a colourful facsimile thereof), and follows the exploits of Kubo (Art Parkinson of Game Of Thrones), who is forced into a titanic magical struggle when a spirit from the past threatens everything that he holds dear. Teaming up with a talking monkey (Charlize Theron) and a warrior beetle (Matthew McConaughey), Kubo must learn to use his magical shamisen (the two stringed instrument of the title) to save the day.
At the film’s press conference, its two Oscar winning stars – Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey – were instantly hit up about what animated films and TV shows they got into when they were kids. “The first thing that I can think of is Looney Tunes,” Theron replies. “Television only came to South Africa in 1976, so we were a little late to the game. We also only had about two hours a night of it, so it was very, very special when it’d come on. When I was around eleven-years-old, we got a VCR, and that was like a game changer for me. I remember getting the little Beta tapes…god, I’m so old…woo, Beta,” Theron laughs. “As a kid, I could watch the Looney Tunes cartoons over and over and over and over and over again. I’d never get bored, and I’d laugh at the same jokes and discover something new every single time. They still play them on the kids’ channels on cable. Every time I see that my child is looking for something to watch, I secretly pop it on because I want to give them a little of what I had. He loves it, but it changes, right? What he has access to now is just so enormous, right? But for me, that was my first experience with animation.”
Matthew McConaughey, as it turns out, was nearly equally as televisually deprived as Theron. “We didn’t have remotes back then, of course,” he smiles. “We turned the three channels on the TV with the ears up…we had PBS, ABC, and NBC. I don’t think we were allowed a Beta machine. I didn’t watch much media growing up, and I didn’t watch much animation. But I do remember seeing Land Of The Lost for the first time on a Saturday morning. That world, and the opening credits…I remember the opening credits, where they’d go off the waterfall, and the world that they’d end up in…that opened me up quite a bit. The other show would be The Incredible Hulk, with Lou Ferrigno. You knew that he was going to get big and green twice in the hour, at 7:22pm and then at about 7:41pm. It was going to happen twice. There was an oxygen tank around, which usually there happened to magically be, and he was going to throw it in slow motion, and it’d be awesome.”
Kubo And The Two Strings is released in cinemas on August 18.
