Orion and the Dark
Directed by Sean Charmatz
Written by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Emma Yarlett
Featuring the voices of Jacob Tremblay, Paul Walter Hauser and Angela Bassett
Classification G; 82 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Feb. 2
Critic’s Pick
Have enough children and you’ll eventually find yourself exposed, only occasionally in a Clockwork Orange-style manner, to the highs and lows of contemporary animated cinema. Now three kids deep, I can testify to the smarmy addictiveness of Sing 2, the downward spiral of Pixar, and the franchise-sludge doom heralded by The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Which is all just a long way of saying thank goodness for Charlie Kaufman.
Yes, that Kaufman – the cerebral auteur behind such jagged cinematic puzzles as Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who has now decided to enter the children’s market with the new animated feature Orion and the Dark. And unlike the last time that Kaufman used the technical means of a kids’ film – the adults-only 2015 stop-motion film Anomalisa – this time the filmmaker is playing to the actual tykes in the room. And doing a wonderfully Kaufman-but-not-too-Kaufman-y job of it.
Based on the children’s book by Emma Yarlett, Orion and the Dark follows Orion, a young and wonderfully anxious Kaufman stand-in who, to put it in his own words, is “an 11-year-old kid with severe performance anxiety.” Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is scared of murderous clowns hiding in gutters, of accidentally flooding the school when he goes to the bathroom, of angering a hive of bees, of inadvertently murdering the class bully with a miscalculated uppercut punch, of talking to girls, you know. But Orion is most scared of the dark – which makes nighttime an especially problematic stretch for his exhausted parents.
Too many movies on your to-watch list? Here are the best films of 2023
One day, though, Orion gets a special visitor in the form of Dark (Paul Walter Hauser), the literal manifestation of the great big blackness of our world who is desperate to prove that he is in fact a big ol’ softie. Together with his nightly companions Sleep (Natasia Demetriou), Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), and Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), Dark tries to get Orion to drop his evening neuroses and start enjoying the absence of light. (Light, as a character, also pops up, embodied by the shade-wearing braggadocio of Ike Barinholtz.)
That’s as Charlie Kaufman a children’s story as things get, though the screenwriter – together with first-time director Sean Charmatz, a long-time veteran of Dreamworks Animation’s art department – keep adding meta-contextual layers to the narrative. Halfway through, it turns out that Orion is narrating the story as an adult (voiced by Colin Hanks) to his own young daughter, Hypatia (Mia Akemi Brown, playing, yes, a character named after the Neoplatonist philosopher), who is nursing her own fear of the dark. And then some David Foster Wallace gags and time-travel shifts get thrown into the mix, too. But it is best to not reveal all the many ambitious ideas – each neatly scaled down to kid-level comprehension – that Kaufman and Charmatz have smuggled into the production.
Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance. Like the best kind of children’s movies, it will make adults tear up and compel children to demand, “Again!” And best of all: not a Minion or Mario in sight.