So I watched Kubo, which has absolutely nothing to do with Bleach and thus has no Bankais. I didn’t find it bad as I found it empty. Nothing much happens to keep you engaged, and this comes from someone who is not part of the smartphone generation. My attention span is much higher than 5 seconds and I still had the urge to skip forward or multitask for half of the movie.
Every scene plays out in a very basic way, which seems fine when you describe it, but is otherwise not excusing the duration or the scope of the story. On paper you have deities invading from the moon and want to stop a boy and its animal companions from gathering the pieces of an armor that can rival their king. And they travel through stormy seas and caves full of undead, while fighting flying kung-fu witches. Sounds amazing but when you actually see it, it’s like… ah, is that all?
I otherwise like the themes in the story. The conflict is mostly internal, characters are fleshed out on a basic level, and the stop-motion they used looks amazing. None of that excuse a movie’s worth of duration. You almost never see more than 3 characters on screen, and whatever they are doing is not keeping you engaged. The world felt like it was just one village and random monster encounters. It never felt like it was bursting with life.
I didn’t even like the battles. They look spectacular for a few seconds but they otherwise don’t have any actual flow or strategy in them. And I have to point this out; last moment saves are abundant. You can count a dozen times when Kubo is in danger and someone jumps out of nowhere to save him. It’s full of fake tension which makes you not believe the characters are in any actual danger.
I don’t even think most of the battles and the adventure were significant in the longrun. Kubo went through all this mess just to do something he already knew about all along. He didn’t learn it, he hadn’t forgotten it, he didn’t even have to realize it. It was always there. Getting the armor meant nothing in the end because it still came down to the power of friendship. Which he used in the village the story begins in. Which means he didn’t need to go on a journey, he could have simply stayed there and used the damn power since the very beginning. What was the point of the adventure?
And I am not done with the complaints, I didn’t even like how fast Kubo trusted those animals. He didn’t grow up with them, they were not his friends, they were strangers who appeared out of nowhere and insisted they have to help him. Which they do. Over a dozen times. With cheap last moment saves. My point is, there is not much chemistry amongst the major characters. They are unfamiliar to each other, thus they feel more like plot devises so Kubo can have someone to talk with, or to save his ass from every monster he encounters. And yes, by the end of the film you learn those animals are not really strangers to him, but it’s only because the bad guys were infodumping in the middle of the battle and not because the animals revealed it themselves.
Furthermore, we have zero characterization for the bad guys. We know nothing about them besides being evil and supposed living on the moon. We don’t even see the moon. We never seem them outside the scenes they are attacking Kubo, which makes you not care about them. Two of them go as far as wearing masks so they can look even more inhuman, and the third which has a face eventually mutates into an ugly monster which you would want to see dead. So lazy!
So basically, the creators focused only on the moral message and the stop motion, while doing very little for excusing a whole movie about them. And although I understand this is basically aimed at kids, the ending was anti-climactic. It made a dull adventure no kid will be paying attention to (because they will be playing with their smartphones) feeling pointless because it came down to the souls of the dead coming to save the protagonist with the power of friendship because he was really passionate while playing the lute. Boring!