Familiar, tedious and an odd disconnect in human sentiment, Kubo and the Two Strings feels nothing more than a half-baked stop motion Miyazaki mimicry. The character development was so poorly managed, it became an unforgiving struggle to remain engaged and invested in the title character’s ghoulish journey and fates of the surrounding characters. While it fails thematically, Kubo is so gorgeously animated it’s hard to deny it at least as an artistic achievement. While it’s disappointing to not share in the sentiment with the rest of the film community, I’m beginning to believe some are just too overly-enticed by its simpleness and aesthetic beauty to recognize its many failures in character-driven storytelling. *shrug*