Kubo and the Two Strings (Focus Features) Kubo and Sausage Party draw life from the eye The best moment in recent animated films was The Lego Movie song, “Everything Is Awesome!!” An uproarious satire on this consumer age’s feel-good propaganda, it also critiqued the forced progressivism that infects everything from Apple gadgets and Pixar movies to America’s Pravda-inspired news media. The marketplace lost its ability to receive instruction from satire, and our president wound up seriously paraphrasing “Everything is awesome” in response to a partisan candidate. The momentary lift one got from The Lego Movie returns with a new animated film, Kubo and the Two Strings, then it gets snatched away by a second cartoon, Sausage Party. Kubo responds to the crisis of our rotted popular culture, while Sausage Party reprocesses its already ground-up entrails. Not a satire like The Lego Movie, Kubo is a delicate tale addressing today’s sense of moral bereavement.
This is conveyed through the boy’s search for the father he never knew. Little Kubo’s gallantry parallels the desperation of youth from broken families as well as adults who are estranged from now-outmoded cultural and moral traditions. It’s no wonder that Laika, the film’s production company, which also made the very fine Coraline and ParaNorman, based Kubo on Asian folklore. American folklore is in disrepute, undermined by “transformative” politics that question patriarchy and national and religious history. Kubo’s vaguely Buddhist fairytale (featuring vengeful ghosts and ideas on reincarnation) passes muster through its nondenominational focus. When Kubo journeys, carrying a bracelet made from his mother’s hair (plus a monkey charm and a samurai origami figure, which come to life as a furry monkey and a black beetle), he’s told that the bracelet is “Memory — and memories are powerful.” The history and emotion contained in memories become the source of Kubo’s moral learning.
His expedition differs from Pixar adventures, which always literalize the return to a place. Here, the recovery, or discovery, of a moral state gives Kubo its beauty. One of the boy’s guides is asked, “If you have no memory how can you be certain of anything?” So director Travis Knight continues Laika’s sensuous ochre visual palette with imagery that evokes global myths — from Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones to the Ancient Mariner’s autumnal ship and more. Kubo offers sustenance through the boy’s faithful one-eyed vision and cultural memory. His magically enlivened origami figures attest the spirit of hand-tooled imagination and of storytelling traditions. Kubo offers sustenance through the boy’s faithful one-eyed vision and cultural memory. One especially striking image represents the cultural process of memory: Early in his journey, the boy and his companions enter the Far Lands and see broken monuments buried in sand like that fearsome image of the Statue of Liberty at the end of The Planet of the Apes.
Nothing in the clever, cheery The Lego Movie evoked anything this profound. Through Kubo’s yearning, Travis and Laika suggest a generation deprived of a cultural memory that would sustain them. This may have begun with the bogus mythology of Stars Wars. It’s why even Spielberg’s The BFG felt hollow. Since Pixar, animated movies have become a way for society to hide from its own anxieties, placate them with empty technologies that lack tactile dimensions (Laika’s use of 3D in Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo results in almost tangible visual perception), and ultimately distract from receiving emotional essence through vision. It is eye contact between Kubo’s parents (“You are my quest”) that aids his — and our — maturity. Reviewers who cynically boast that Sausage Party “isn’t kids’ stuff” have it wrong. Or else they have forgotten the capacity that eleven-year-old boys — and post-adolescent frat boys — have for 90 minutes of smirking. What Sausage Party lacks is the innocence of those old grade-school hot-dogs-and-donuts gags.
Instead, producer Seth Rogen, who attempted to destroy U.S.–North Korean relations with The Interview, continues his self-amusement with self-congratulatory political satire. He replaces the Hollywood critique of his mostly funny This Is the End with Sausage Party’s atheistic allegory. Here, Rogen’s usual vulgar human characters become animated comestibles. But these aren’t just products; the horny male sausages, lusty female buns, and assorted other items on Shopwell’s shelves represent humanity — but humanity revealed as commodities. Despite the use of animation (directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon) this is only a new version of Moloch: mankind seen as merchandise waiting to be consumed by the cruel and malignant gods they worship. Sausage Party opens with a pale riff on “Everything Is Awesome” — a song called “Dear gods,” a mash-up of South Park and The Book of Mormon. It’s not enough for Rogen to satirize gluttonous habits; he appeals to debauchery — James Franco injecting bath salts, Nick Kroll as a douche product who rapes Vincent Tong as a juice box, Salma Hayek as a lesbian taco, with a climactic food orgy.
Rogen flaunts human instincts repressed by religion: Michael Cera and Kristen Wiig play the hot-dog-and-bun couple who argue logic over faith. A surprising misstep in Kubo confronts the boy hero with a malicious ancestor who exploits religion, promising immortality from “hate, heartache, suffering, and death.” Not exactly sure how this modern skepticism sneaked into Kubo, but, as part of the way contemporary animation traffics in social turmoil, it doesn’t help. Neither does the surprise of Rogen’s Mideast parody (David Krumholtz as lavash arguing/sexting with Edward Norton as a bagel) or Rogen’s anti-American skits (Craig Robinson as grits, Bill Hader as tobacco, Scott Underwood as a Twinkie, representing respectively “nonperishable” black, Native American, and gay groups). This is Rogen mocking the basic banality of tribal politics. None of this elevates Sausage Party’s “message.” It stays in the toilet. That’s what you get after ingesting junk. — Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award in 2014.