Kubo and the Two Strings

kubo1 Movie, BD, 101 mins, 2.35:1, 2016, by LAIKA
I saw this got some very good reviews so I invested in a BD copy.
The story is set in a fantasy Japan. A woman is washed up on a beach by a storm. With her is a baby which appears to have lost one eye. Ten years or so later the two are not doing great. They live in a cave and the mother is mostly catatonic while the boy does story-telling at a local village. He uses some powerful magic from his three-string shamisen to turn sheets of paper into origami figures to act out his stories.
His mother warns him never to stay out after dark otherwise bad things will happen. Of course, on the day of the O-bon festival he does stay out and his aunts, scary black figures, fly out of the gloom and attack him. His mother uses the last of her magic to let him escape, and so Kubo embarks on a quest for a magical sword and armour, accompanied by a monkey and a beetle.

I loved this. The Japanese village setting is carefully researched. The animation is done in stop-motion, with CGI processing, and what you see on screen is often beautiful. The story moves through a large number of settings, with magic, and fight scenes, before reaching a conclusion. Recommended.
The animators, LAIKA, are the same people who did Coraline and other successful animations.