By Travis Johnson

The new, albeit brief, look at Kubo and the Two Strings continues to impress. Everything about this movie is intriguing: the ancient Japanese setting; the painterly, puppetly (that’s a word now) aesthetic of the animation; the use of The Beatles; Matthew McConaughey’s bug warrior – everything.

Speaking of the use of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, director Travis Knight noted, “It’s so thematically tied into this movie. I’ve loved the Beatles my entire life. My mum was, I think she was sixteen, when the Beatles came to America so in a lot of ways the Beatles were a soundtrack to my childhood. At the time, when George Harrison wrote that song he was reading the Chinese book of changes, the I Ching. And part of that idea was that everything was interconnected, there was no coincidences, everything has a connection to everything else. To test that theory, he was in his mum’s house, he opened the book and he decided to write a song about the first thing that he saw and the phrase was ‘gently weeps’ and so the whole song was kind of that philosophy put into music. So again, it’s a fusion of east to west and of those philosophical things at play there. What’s more, is it’s an incredibly beautiful song and the film is basically, from a narrative point of view, it’s a love letter from a boy to his mother and we see this from the other way around, from mother to son.”

Kubo looks like it could be a really unique and special animated film, which means it could be too weird for your average punter and have to find a life on home release (there’s form for this, and it’s called The Iron Giant).  Still, it’ll definitely benefit from a big screen viewing. Kubo and the Two Strings hits Australian cinemas on August 18, following its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

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