It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Genevieve Koski.

Keith Phipps.

And Scott Tobias is currently on vacation, but we'll be back soon.

In the first half of this conversation, we talked about how Jim Henson's in 1982 movie The Dark Crystal connected

with us on an intellectual basis, because we love so much about the visible hard work

that went into the production, but how it left us a little cold emotionally. That's a criticism

we've seen coming from other critics with LICO Studios, Kubo and the Two Strings, which has a

similar deep personal investment from the filmmakers, and plenty of similarly fun behind-the-scenes

stories, but still has a protagonist who can be a little too basic and familiar, and a little

difficult to love. Like a CEO, Travis Knight, says all the right things about what the company

wants to do with its stories, how its goal is to make movies that matter, how its creators

consciously think through the themes of the stories they're telling.

And I personally go into every like a movie wanting to love it in order to respect the craft and hard work that go into everything the studio does. It's like the kind of fandom that animation

fans bring to Pixar movies, but that level of high expectations can inevitably bring a little

disappointment along with it. But is Kubo and the two strings disappointing? The movie tells the story of a young boy named Kubo who lost an eye and nearly lost his life when he was a baby. His mother fought to save him, but came away scarred and mentally damaged. So when Kubo has to set out to reclaim his birthright, he has to leave his mother behind and travel with two new companions, a cranky, fierce monkey called monkey, and a

four-armed samurai named Beetle.

Together they go on a quest, find some magical items, and fight three fiendish creatures

from Kubo's past.

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