The reviews for Kubo and the Two Strings look to be very good. There is already Oscar buzz surrounding the film, believe it or not, so it’s definitely one to put on your radar.
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich writes:
Staggeringly beautiful and immensely true, the best animated film of 2016 — one of the year’s best films of any kind, really — is a stop-motion fable about a one-eyed boy in mythical Japan that was made by a team of gifted visionaries in an Oregon warehouse. Laika, the independent studio behind morbid enchantments like “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” has already established itself as a formidable bulwark against the ever-accelerating onslaught of computer-generated 3D cartoons, but “Kubo and the Two Strings” makes even the most painstaking of their previous movies feel like a trial run.
And the Village Voice’s Bilge Ebiri:
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the past decade or so, its own style of aesthetically acute storytelling: Previous efforts have remained indelible thanks to their striking, evocative visuals.
There is a mild controversy about the casting of white actors to play Japanese characters (a strange choice, no doubt) but many have said though that be a problem for them, the animation is beautiful and the story is moving.