SEEEM

The movie starts off with Kubo telling parts of his beloved story about how he lost his left eye, all while playing his shamisen to entertain the people of a nearby village. He does so for the entire day and only stops once the sun starts to set. Much to the disappointment of the listeners he always stops his story exactly at sunset. This is because his mother told him never to stay out after dark and the moment he doesn’t return in time we learn the truth behind his story.

So much for the premise, but now let’s take a look at the visuals which are undoubtedly one of this movie’s main selling points. Even though parts of it are CGI and there are special effects added digitally most of it is still traditional stop motion with handmade puppets, costumes and sets. To achieve the incredibly smooth expressions and movements though they used 3D printers to print out a new part for every miniscule change on a character. This resulted in about 66 000 interchangeable parts for Kubo’s face alone. Since the faces are usually divided in an upper and a lower half there are roughly 48 million different facial expressions, once again just for Kubo.*

The soundtrack is filled to the brim with very distinct asian sounding songs and it's in no way inferior to the visuals. Dario Marianelli did an amazing job orchestrating it, especially during the scenes where Kubo is playing his instrument and it becomes part of the soundtrack.

I can only recommend checking this movie out even if it’s just to marvel at the animation (check the gif below for a little behind the scenes process)!

Gif Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhFRjaWYe_0

The first step, as surprising as it may be, is to think of a couple of characters (I will be using the three you can see up above). Next you need to take a careful look at their key features, certain parts of the face that capture the personality or the appeal of the character the best.

As you can see I drew over the previous sketches and made little notes to help myself understand what I want to push in terms of their design.

The elderly man on the right for example has a pretty big schnoz which looks like it’s trying to escape the face, pulling all the other facial regions with it.

The woman? on the left has a very triangular shaped head and a look that could kill so let’s try to accentuate that.

Last and also least the guy in the middle has a somewhat longer nose and he’s crossing his eyes. 

Pushing all the aforementioned features, I ended up with this: