Spoilers for Kubo and the Two Strings. I'm posting it under "miscellaneous" until ffn creates a category for it, haha, but my enthusiasm for this movie could not be contained until then because oh my word, you guys.

Kubo is one of the most stunning films I've seen in a long time. There's so much meaning and foreshadowing everywhere and, as I was flailing, I realized that Kubo had never been able to sit outside at night? Never been able to go stargazing?! And it hurt a lot D:

Title from Stars, a song from Les Miserables

In Your Multitudes

August 27, 2016

Everything is different when Kubo returns. His home, set high in the rocky cliff, doesn't seem the same as it was before, with its ashy fireplace and crevices where the origami paper once rested, waiting to be called into life.

He falls back into the routine of caring for someone else easily enough— cooking for two, and leading his grandfather to the place his mother used to lay before he thinks about sleep himself.

But sleep is elusive, despite his fatigue. The moonlight reflects off the stone above him just as it always has, but tonight, it seems different. He turns, pushing himself up and making his way to the rocky ledge outside.

He sits beneath the moon and looks out across the water, watching the beams sparkle on the sea below. He has never done this before, he realizes, as the wind tugs at his hair. He had been forbidden, or was too busy running for his life to notice the night sky.

It is quiet, dark, and endless—an unfathomable expanse punctuated with sparkling stars in every direction. Kubo stares up and up and up and thinks he understands how someone can become so lost and cold.

Clouds pass in front of the moon that hangs, glowing, over everything, blocking out light as something shuffles in the cave behind him. He jolts upright, whirling around to see his grandfather emerging from the shadows. He is ghost-like, dressed in such a pale blue, as he silently kneels beside him.

Kubo stares, but his grandfather does nothing but slowly turn his milky gaze to the heavens. He eventually does the same, stopping only as his grandfather raises a bony finger upward, pointing to a bright cluster of stars.

It is Orihime, he says, the daughter of the King of the Sky. And there, he moves his arm across the way, her lover, whom she can only meet on one short night each year.

The two stare into the sky and he names every star in the heavens, a smile on his lips as he recalls each of their stories. Kubo hangs onto his every word, wide-eyed as the words transform the pinpricks of light into something else entirely.

The man, who remembers nothing of himself or where he has come from, kneels outside his daughter's home of exile and tells her son of the things he cannot forget.