(10/09/16 10:44pm)
Set in ancient Japan, the film “Kubo and the Two Strings” follows the story of a young boy who sets out on a journey to learn the truth about his missing father, his amnesiac mother and the grandfather he’s been running from his whole life.
With a stunning soundtrack by Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli and transformative visuals by Laika Entertainment, “Kubo” is a story that stretches the limitations of its PG rating. Thrilling, suspenseful and sometimes downright terrifying, Laika’s newest feature film isn’t afraid to put its eponymous hero through more difficult and dangerous trials than a typical child protagonist. It also avoids the overly formulaic approach to animated films that most studios have adopted as their method for safe success.
Nothing about “Kubo” is safe. The storyline is drastically different than anything moviegoers are used to. The characters are dynamic and unable to fit into any sort of group-tested mold, and the animation is unconventional and difficult to pull off.
The film begins with the iconic line “If you must blink, do it now,” which is a good tip considering the hours of work stop motion animation requires for just a second of screen time. According to producer Travis Knight, it took Laika animators a week to complete a minute of footage. Their painstaking effort paid off; the final product blends the style of stop motion and the flow of computer-generated animation seamlessly.
Its unique animation style matches its unique story. The main conflict revolves around family, what it means to be a part of one, and how far one would be willing to go to protect theirs.
Kubo’s parents have an important role to play, which is a stark contrast to Hollywood’s love of killing parents off early, or completely forgetting their impact. They also manage to be their own characters independent of their son, with their own strengths and flaws, avoiding the popular trope of making parents (especially fathers) infallible wells of wisdom and experience.
The ending, above all else, is particularly striking. The production team had the thematic means to wrap up the movie in a happy bow, and no one could have faulted them for doing so; the journey itself was harrowing enough. However, Laika instead uses the last ten minutes of the film to make a powerful statement about the nature of loss.
Despite its darker themes, Kubo is ultimately a story about love, forgiveness, and accepting people as they are, flaws and all. Its heroes are genuine and its villains are genuinely scary, but no characters are beyond redemption.
(09/14/16 8:58pm)
Walking through the hallways of residence buildings, it’s impossible to miss the quick sketches of gorillas and the accompanying slogans, “Harambe didn’t deserve it” or “RIP Harambe 2k16.” Although he’s had bathroom stall graffiti, dry erase board murals, and trending hashtags devoted to preserving his memory, not a lot of people know the full story of how one gorilla rose to celebrity status almost overnight.
Harambe was a silverback gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. According to the LA Times, on April 28, 2016, a day after his 17th birthday, a zookeeper shot Harambe with a rifle in order to protect a young child who had fallen into his enclosure. A video of the incident went viral, receiving over 12 million views before YouTube removed it. Following the video’s removal, several mirrored and watermarked remakes replaced the original, allowing the footage to spread without being removed again.
A month after his death, Reddit featured Harambe on the front page of their news forum and a Change.org user created a petition entitled “Justice for Harambe,” in which she called for the parents of the child to be “held accountable if the investigation finds that there was negligence involved.” The petition gained over 300,000 signatures in its first two days, and its corresponding hashtag, #JusticeForHarambe, began trending on Twitter, where it became more visible to a broader audience.
In subsequent weeks, news outlets treated Harambe as a legitimate topic, using him as an example to start a conversation about the environmental and ethical dangers of keeping animals in captivity. However, as with anything that spends too long in the limelight, Harambe’s death came to be something of a joke. Various Twitter users began rewriting famous sad songs in his honor, featuring him in tributes with celebrities that had died in 2016, and photoshopping his face onto clouds alongside generic epitaphs.
As they gained popularity, Harambe jokes no longer became limited to Twitter. On July 10th, an Ohio teen and three friends sent error reports to Google Maps, trying to convince employees that their school was on Harambe Drive and not Sharkland Road. Maintenance took their claim seriously and on the following Friday, South High School could be found on Harambe Drive. During Ruby Tuesday’s earnings call, a man calling himself Buddy Fox of the Geneva Roth Holding Company, both of which are fictional names taken from the movie “Wall Street” (1997), asked the restaurant if their fourth-quarter failings were a direct result of Harambe’s death. A group of girls from the Troy, Michigan school district wore shirts that spelled out “Harambe 1999-2016” in their school ID profiles. On August 20th, a hacker managed to take over the Cincinnati Zoo director’s twitter and spammed his feed with tweets in solidarity with #JusticeforHarambe.
After these incidents, the Cincinnati Zoo issued a public statement addressing their late gorilla’s reincarnation as an internet phenomenon. They admonished the public’s treatment of Harambe, as they were still grieving one of their own and making greater strides towards gorilla conservation.
Whether by sparking animal rights movements or internet memes, Harambe, in death, has become so much more than just a gorilla.