e first see the world from above the clouds. As far as our eyes can see, black lines emerge from the cloud and ascend into heaven.
At ground level we find a strange world inhabited by marionettes. They are fully aware that they're marionettes. They know about the strings attached to their limbs that extend upward into their sky. When they battle each other, usually with scythes, they find severed limbs mere inconveniences, easily repaired with spare parts scavenged from slaves or fallen enemies. But severed head strings are instantly fatal.
Kahro (Glover), the ruler of Hebalon, is so wracked with guilt over a lifetime of brutal warfare against his sworn enemies, the Zeriths, that he leaves a will charging his son Hal (McAvoy) with a mission to unite the two warring peoples. But evil forces, including Picaro's half-brother Nezo (Jacobi) and the monstrous warrior Ghrak (Ian Hart), have too much to gain by whipping the people into a state of war. They kill Kahro, destroy the will and frame the Zeriths for the deed, manipulating Hal into abandoning the castle for a pointless mission of vengeance.
The remaining members of the royal family, including Hal's lovely sister Jhinna (Claire Skinner), soon find evidence of Mizo's trickery, only to be thrown into an open-air dungeon, where they're hemmed in by the crossbars in the ceiling that curtail the movement of the strings connecting them to heaven.
Still on his misguided mission of vengeance, Hal meets a beautiful woman named Zita (McCormack), who proves their love connection by demonstrating that her strings are directly tied to his. He doesn't know that Zita is a Zerith, and that her birthright makes her the very enemy he's sworn to kill.
A regular Lord of the Strings
Strings seems easy to resist, for the first few minutes. After all, the puppets are deliberately primitive, with fixed facial expressions and lips that make no pretense of moving to match the dialogue spoken by the respective characters (a design that makes dubbing the film into multiple languages absurdly seamless). And their strings, which figure in the story, are designed for visibility, rather than for unobtrusiveness: They're so very obvious that offscreen crowds can be discerned by the concentration of thick black lines.
Then the fascinating cosmology takes over. You see that all the buildings in this civilization are constructed without ceilings and that people are regularly rained on when inside their castle walls. You see that a simple crossbar over a doorway presents an impassable barrier, that children engaged in rough play need to be protected from getting tangled and that babies are not gestated but carved by woodworkers. You even see that the actual moment of birth, depicted in one gorgeous scene, involves strings descending from the sky and lovingly being attached by the elder members of the family. And you see that death by natural causes is marked by the sad moment when the unseen puppeteers let go and the strings, suddenly slack, come spiraling down from the clouds.
It's so fully imagined, so spectacularly filmed, so filled with set pieces of incredible beauty and so much in command of its tone, that the story comes to life, and the physical limitations of the "actors" become a substantial part of their pathos and charm. This works equally well in scenes of massive armies engaging in puppet slaughter and more intimate scenes involving romantic love. Last year's Team America: World Police used significantly less stylized marionettes in a sex scene infamous for its ludicrous carnality. This film accomplishes something far more difficult, by placing far less expressive puppets in a love scene that actually delivers the emotional goods. This is not a joke. We've all seen A-list Hollywood actors, paired in major movies, who showed less romantic chemistry. By the time Hal and Zita discover that they're hereditary enemies, fighting a war we know to be based on outright fraud, their fates matter to us. We want them together.
How good is Strings? It has heroes doing the wrong thing, villains who have ample motivation for their actions, a universe completely contrary to our own that nevertheless operates with perfect internal consistency, a simple concept it maintains with unflagging inventiveness, an epic scale achieved at 88 minutes, moments of great tragedy, moments of breathtaking beauty and moments that resonate with overtones of fate, injustice, the nature of the heavens and the pointless hereditary prejudices that may or may not defy our own ability to overcome them. In short, it's not just one of the best fantasy films of the past few years. It's one of the best, most fully imagined fantasy films of all time. I rank it alongside The Lord of the Rings movies, and no, I'm not kidding.
