"Ok, I know this one’s cheating. I don’t care. So it’s not a movie, so what? It did start as a movie, so it totally counts. No TV show has meant more to me than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stop laughing, I’m serious. It’s one of the greatest things ever created in the history of mankind. I said stop. How dare you?! I will fight you! I will fight you and I will win. It’s the best. Every right-thinking person knows that. When Buffy was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I’m pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed. It defied, merged, bent, and blended genres, masterfully commingling fantasy and reality. It dealt with issues of real substance. It treated its audience intelligently, with the utmost respect. Over a decade after it went off the air, it still had residence in my head and heart, and served as a model for what Kubo became: real life wrapped in metaphor. Like Buffy, we explore triumph and tragedy, loss and healing, and compassion, and forgiveness through the stylized prism of fantasy. We acknowledge that part of life… is death. That lives can be thrown away and lost and upended in an unfair and random act of casual violence, without the grandeur and rousing speechifying often found in heroic movie deaths. People we love are often ripped away from us, in an instant. And we need to find a way to reconcile that a part of life is struggle, and it has a cost. Kubo and the Two Strings, like life, like Buffy, is wonderfully bittersweet. So thank you, Joss Whedon, for giving me so much high-spirited joy and gut-wrenching heartache. You saved the world. A lot."

"When I heard Girl Talk I was already in Bikini Kill, towards starting my solo Julie Ruin thing and I clicked with everything with a female performer on it. I was always aware of Lesley Gore and her songs and Joan Jett had covered some of them and I was like, "Oh, these are actually kind of feminist." The things that I learned from her from that album in particular was that there was a certain quality to her voice that told a different story than some of the lyrics. The lyrics could be about one thing but the way she sang; her singing had such an amazing tone that you really can't duplicate. I was just listening to the tones of her voice, thinking about the voice as an instrument and thinking – this is when I was doing my solo record — "It's not just the lyrics you're singing, it's how you're singing them." And so much can come across in the way you're singing that can either underline or scratch out the lyrics or amplify them. So I started to realise there were all these nuances there and her voice just viscerally affected me. I started playing with that idea a lot on the solo record. Some things didn't really have lyrics, I was just singing made-up nonsense stuff, it was just the way I was singing that was getting across, I was just going for a feeling. I was really focused on the lyrics in Bikini Kill and getting across these certain ideas and then listening to Lesley Gore I started realising it's not just the lyrics but the tone. That you can make the song sound like a sunny day and you're driving in your car having a great time and you can make the song sound like it's been raining for the past year; that was a new thing I found in my tool box."