Dreamworks and Charlie Kaufman may seem an odd pairing, but this is technically the second animated film Kaufman has scripted, following 2015’s Anomalisa. Orion and the Dark is Kaufman in miniature, an existential crisis for kids told with a ’90s comic strip style. I’ve been less enthused with what we can generously call “his whole thing” than some, but Kaufman’s brand of malaise is tamped down by necessity. Orion and the Dark, a Netflix/Dreamworks co-production, is small-scale and charming, with just enough flair to keep it from feeling like a straight-to-video feature. The animation has a swoopy quality to it, a scratchiness akin to the Littlebigplanet games. As this is a Charlie Kaufman script, the story gets away from itself by the final act, but it’s entertaining enough if you want kids to consider the purpose of the universe.
Orion (Jacob Tremblay, hitting puberty like a brick wall) is an anxious kid, afraid of anything and everything. As a Charlie Kaufman lead, he catastrophizes over the smallest thing, like crossing the street or talking to a classmate. But Orion’s greatest fear is the dark itself, which sends him into an existential spiral every night. Orion has resigned himself to a life of fear and misery, but the darkness itself has other plans. The Dark (Paul Walter Hauser) manifests as a jolly grim reaper type in Orion’s bedroom, promising that he will cure his fear of the dark once and for all by showing him his nightly routine.
The Dark takes Orion into the night sky, introducing him to the other supernatural creatures he works with. The Dark flies across the world, bringing the nighttime. His coworkers, including Sleep (Natasia Demetriou), Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), and Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), are Pixar-esque floaty concepts with silly voices and running jokes. Orion watches them work and asks questions as only an outsider can. Why do they do these things? What’s the point? The nighttime creatures think they know, but they’re all knocked out of orbit by Orion’s consternation– The Dark especially, his own emotions leading him to do something pretty drastic. It’s up to Orion to set everything right and overcome his fears.
The concept of a Charlie Kaufman kids movie is more interesting in theory than practice. Orion’s spirals got to be a bit more real than I expected, but this isn’t I’m Thinking of Ending Things. There are a lot of Inside Out-esque mechanics, which are explained but underused. Paul Walter Hauser does good work as the Dark, but the character doesn’t get to be much more than a friendly giant. Like most Netflix films, it’s more of an inexplicable object than a real movie, but one worth taking note of.
Orion and the Dark
2024
Dir. Sean Charmatz
90 min
