While I think all animation is a magic trick that remains just as impressive now as the first time I saw it as a child, there are certainly levels of difficulty, and stop-motion animation is a special ...

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 ...

Early in “Kubo and the Two Strings,” our hero meekly strides into an ancient Japanese village marketplace the way Toshiro Mifune might have entered a Kurosawa film, but with greater bustle. Kubo, a ...

Travis Knight may be following in the footsteps of people like Pixar’s John Lasseter, Illumination’s Chris Meledandri and, way back when, Walt Disney himself. The CEO of Laika animation is also a ...

Kubo and the Two Strings Voices of Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey. Directed by Travis Knight. Rated PG. Opens Friday citywide. Pixar gets all the attention among American ...

This story about “Kubo and the Two Strings” first appeared in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine. The idea for “Kubo and the Two Strings” was simple, and it was ridiculously hard. “The ...

The night is dark and full of terrors, even for Kubo and the Two Strings. A new behind-the-scenes look at the stop-motion-CG hybrid reveals how some of these terrifying stop-motion beasties came to ...

This year, Laika and Focus Features brought us animated Oscar contender “The Boxtrolls,” and now they’ve announced their fourth collaboration, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” the directorial debut of ...

"It was by far the largest puppet we ever created. It seemed insane," says VFX supervisor Steve Emerson. By Carolyn Giardina Tech Editor “We were initially going to build a small, manageable skeleton, ...

★★★ Credits: Directed by Travis Knight; voice performances by Art Parkinson, Rooney Mara, Ralph Fiennes, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey Running time/rating: 1:41; Rated PG for thematic elements, ...

Early in "Kubo and the Two Strings," our hero meekly strides into an ancient Japanese village marketplace the way Toshiro Mifune might have entered a Kurosawa film, but with greater bustle. Kubo, a ...