49 Fun Facts About Kubo and the Two Strings

Which whispered line opens Kubo and the Two Strings?

If you must blink, do it now. Kubo whispers the warning over a black screen before the first image, then shouts it again in the village square as he begins his street performance.

Travis Knight followed Kubo, his directing debut, with which live-action Transformers film?

Bumblebee. For his first live-action film, Kubo's director set the story in 1987 and stripped the robots back to the look of the original 1980s toys and cartoon.

Which animation technique is Kubo and the Two Strings mainly made with?

Stop-motion. Animators posed real puppets one frame at a time and swapped in 3D-printed faces for each expression, while computers filled in the backgrounds behind them.

What magical instrument does Kubo play?

Shamisen. The three-stringed Japanese lute is played with a large pick called a bachi, and Kubo snaps two of its strings in the blast that defeats one of his pursuers.

Who took Kubo's left eye when he was a baby?

The Moon King. He is Kubo's own grandfather, and he wants the other eye too, so the boy will be blind to humanity and take a place beside him, immortal, in the heavens.

Which Game of Thrones actor voices Kubo?

Art Parkinson. The Irish teenager, Rickon Stark in Game of Thrones, voices a one-eyed boy who supports his ailing mother by telling stories in the village market.

Who voices Monkey, Kubo's stern protector on his quest?

Charlize Theron. Her Monkey is a surly, deadpan guardian who warns Kubo that if he does not eat he will be weak, then slow, then dead, and sets off with him to find his father's armor.

Who voices Beetle, the forgetful samurai who joins Kubo's quest?

Matthew McConaughey. His Beetle is a samurai cursed into an insect's shell with no memory of his own name, sure only that he once served the great warrior Hanzo.

Which Harry Potter actor voices Kubo's grandfather?

Ralph Fiennes. He first appears as a kindly blind old man, then bursts into a towering monster for the final battle, a turn one critic called his most Voldemortian.

Who voices both of the twin Sisters who hunt Kubo?

Rooney Mara. She voices both twins, sent by their father to take Kubo's remaining eye; Monkey beats one in a storm on the water and Kubo's music fells the other.

What does Kubo's music bring to life when he tells stories in the village?

Origami figures. As Kubo plays, sheets of paper leap from his bag and fold themselves into a tiny warrior and the beasts he fights, among them a fire-breathing chicken.

Who does Kubo's guardian Monkey turn out to be?

Kubo's mother. She spent the last of her magic saving him and came back as his guardian, a truth he sees in a vision while a creature of the deep holds him entranced.

Who is Kubo's companion Beetle revealed to be?

Kubo's father. Beetle is the samurai Hanzo, cursed into an insect's body and robbed of his memory by Kubo's grandfather for running away with his daughter.

Which festival does Kubo attend, hoping to speak with Hanzo's spirit?

Obon. Kubo folds a paper lantern at the graveside to call his father, and when no spirit answers he crushes it in anger, then smooths it out again in shame.

The first piece of armor Kubo recovers is a blade called the Sword what?

Unbreakable. The sword is lodged among dozens of blades in a giant creature's skull, and Kubo has to smash through their hilts to find the right one and wrench it free.

Which piece of the armor Kubo seeks turns out to be his village's bell?

The helmet. Little Hanzo points Kubo to a drawing of the Helmet Invulnerable, and the boy sees that it is the bell he has heard ring over his village every evening.

Where do Kubo and Beetle find the Breastplate Impenetrable?

At the bottom of a lake. Kubo and Beetle dive for it from their boat, and the creature guarding it holds Kubo in a trance until Beetle hauls him out, unconscious.

What kind of creature is the Garden of Eyes that Kubo meets?

A sea monster. Its many eyes hold victims spellbound with visions of secrets until it can eat them, and Kubo is freed only when Beetle shoots an arrow into one.

What becomes of Kubo's grandfather once his powers are stripped away?

He loses his memory. Left a confused, mortal old man, he is told by the villagers that he was the kindest man in the village, and they take him in as one of their own.

In Kubo's final scene, the villagers' floating lanterns transform into what?

Glowing birds. The paper lanterns refold themselves on the river and rise to join a flock said to carry the souls of the dead, while Kubo stands between the spirits of his parents.

Monkey springs to life from which keepsake that Kubo carries?

A wooden charm. Kubo calls the little carved snow monkey Mr. Monkey and keeps it in his pocket, until he wakes one day to find it full-sized, alive and giving him orders.

What does Kubo's mother warn him he must never do?

Stay out after dark. Night is when those who took his eye can find him, and the one evening Kubo lingers past sunset, his hunters appear within moments.

Kubo's makers wanted the film to look like a moving woodblock print in which Japanese style?

Ukiyo-e. The name means 'pictures of the floating world', and the director made its woodblock prints the lens for every design choice, limiting each sequence to a handful of colors.

How are the twin Sisters related to Kubo?

His aunts. They greet him with 'Come to your aunties': the pair stayed loyal to their father when their sister, sent to kill a samurai, fell in love with him instead.

Which Japanese animator's films did Kubo's director name as an enormous influence?

Hayao Miyazaki. Kubo's director calls Studio Ghibli a kindred spirit, and traces his love of Japan to a business trip he tagged along on with his father at the age of eight.

How tall is the giant skeleton puppet that Laika built for Kubo?

16 feet. Laika's effects supervisor says the 400-pound skeleton could have been computer-generated, but the crew was so keen to build the biggest puppet of its kind ever that he backed them.

Where did Laika's crew buy an industrial robot to move Kubo's giant skeleton puppet?

eBay. The factory robot's controls could not talk to the studio's camera system, so the crew built its own motion base, the kind of rig that rocks theme-park rides.

Which composer, an Oscar winner for Atonement, wrote the score for Kubo and the Two Strings?

Dario Marianelli. He studied Japanese scales for the job, saying the West knows little beyond the piano's black keys, and gave Kubo's own cues what he called a rock-and-roll spirit.

Which Beatles track does Regina Spektor perform on the soundtrack?

Marianelli's arrangement includes a shamisen solo and ends with a piano coda.

What does Kubo use as the third and final string when he restrings his instrument?

His own hair. Kubo first strings a bowstring and a strand of hair he has kept, then plucks the third from his head as the beast closes in, and his playing calls up the village's dead.

Where do Kubo and his ailing mother live at the start of the film?

A cave. It sits high above the sea, and Kubo tends his mother there each morning before walking down to the village to earn their living with his stories.

Kubo's composer had also scored which earlier Laika film?

The Boxtrolls. Its directors say they sought him out because their film was a period piece and he was known for scoring costume dramas, and he joined while it was still storyboards.

What does Kubo's magic build a full-sized sailing ship from?

Fallen leaves. Kubo strums until the leaves and twigs on the shore rise and knit themselves into a ship with a billowing sail, leaving his squabbling companions open-mouthed.

Which company released Kubo and the Two Strings in US cinemas?

Focus Features. It had released every Laika feature since Coraline, and Kubo was the first film of a new three-picture deal between the two companies.

Which Japanese filmmaker did Travis Knight call a 'towering influence' on Kubo?

Akira Kurosawa. Kubo's band of mismatched travellers nods to one of his 1950s adventures, the same film whose bickering companions helped inspire Star Wars.

Which animated comedy out-earned Kubo on Kubo's opening weekend?

Sausage Party. The R-rated supermarket comedy held second place in its second week, while the family film it shared multiplexes with opened fourth on $12.6 million.

Which film beat Kubo for the Best Animated Feature Oscar?

Zootopia. Disney's team spent years developing it with the fox as the lead, then decided the story was being told through the wrong animal and handed it to the rabbit.

Until Kubo, which was the only wholly animated film nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar?

The Nightmare Before Christmas. Disney thought the puppet musical too dark and scary for children and released it under its Touchstone label, and it lost the effects Oscar to Jurassic Park.

Which major award did Kubo and the Two Strings win for best animated film?

BAFTA. British voters chose Kubo over three Disney releases, a reversal of the Oscars and Golden Globes, where it was nominated and lost.

What do the twin Sisters hide their faces behind in Kubo?

Smiling Noh masks. The fixed porcelain grins come from Japan's classical masked theatre, and one is split in half by Kubo's pick in the surviving twin's last fight.

Kubo's director Travis Knight is the son of which company's co-founder?

Nike. Phil Knight bought the struggling animation studio where his son worked as an intern, and the son rose to run it before directing Kubo himself.

Before animation, Travis Knight released a 1993 album in which genre as Chilly Tee?

Hip hop. He made demos in a studio built at his father's home, and Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad, produced his album Get Off Mine before he took an animation internship.

Laika, the studio behind Kubo, takes its name from what?

A Soviet space dog. Laika became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957, on a flight with no provision for bringing her back, and she died in orbit; the studio took her name in 2005.

In which US state is Laika, the studio behind Kubo, based?

Oregon. Laika works out of Hillsboro, near Portland, the city where the clay-animation company it grew from had been making films since the 1970s.

Laika grew out of which claymation company, maker of the singing California Raisins?

Will Vinton Studios. Its founder, who coined the word claymation, lost the company in 2002 to its main investor, whose son went on to run it under a new name.

What did the media watchdog MANAA criticise about Kubo and the Two Strings?

Its mostly white voice cast. The group, which monitors how Asian Americans are portrayed, asked why white actors were playing an entire Japanese family in a story so specific to Japan.

What happens to Kubo's village on the night the Sisters find him?

It is left in ruins. Monkey breaks the news when Kubo wakes far away, yet the survivors are waiting among the wreckage when he comes back to face his grandfather.

Where does the surviving Sister spring her trap on Kubo?

Hanzo's abandoned fortress. Kubo goes there for the last piece of armor on the advice of a kindly old man in a dream, who turns out to be his grandfather setting the trap.

Which Star Trek actor voices the villager Hosato in Kubo and the Two Strings?

George Takei. He plays a father watching Kubo's street show with his young daughter, and at its wildest moment he gasps the actor's own catchphrase: 'Oh my!'