Orion and the Dark
Pixar has a certain knack for humanizing the impossible, and DreamWorks and Netflix’s “Orion and the Dark” does it better than many of its recent movies. In fact, it rips so liberally from the prime Pixar notebook of humanizing the impossible specifically “Inside Out” and “Toy Story,” but feels free to nod directly at one in its prologue that this film actually builds on a template instead of just copying it shallowly like so many other Pixar wannabes. This one hits familiar chords to be sure, but it works because it blends writer Charlie Kaufman’s unique sense of storytelling with a heartfelt tale about a boy who wants to feel safe in the world. With sharp character design, entertaining dialogue and positive messaging, “Orion and the Dark” is an early year Netflix surprise.
One doesn’t need to know that this movie was written by the same man who did “Adaptation.” or “Being John Malkovich” to sense that there’s something a little left of center about this script for what’s essentially a family film. It’s not every day you get a David Foster Wallace or Saul Bass reference in a cartoon and that’s just in the prologue. In this clever opening set piece that feels almost like its own short film, Kaufman (working with first time director Sean Charmatz) introduces us to Orion (Jacob Tremblay), an elementary school kid who is afraid of everything: bullies, bees, falling from skyscrapers if he can even imagine it, he knows why it would be terrifying. But more than anything else in his life or any creature on earth, Orion is deathly afraid of the common evolutionary occurrence known as The Dark.
After his loving parents (Carla Gugino & Matt Dellapina) have tried their best to convince him that everything will be OK no matter what time it is outside his window, Orion is visited one night by the Dark itself, voiced to perfection by Paul Walter Hauser. The actor gives a vocal performance here that moves from gregarious to vulnerable over the course of the feature, and it’s another reminder of how much an actor can elevate an animated film when they don’t see it as just an easy paycheck. He clearly considered the arc of something impossible, and made it work by grounding that arc in something relatable. What if the Dark was to Orion what he was to everybody else? What if he too was afraid of being ignored and unneeded in this world where everyone loves on Light (Ike Barinholtz), portrayed here as almost Superman to Dark’s Batman more obviously heroic and less naturally brooding?
The Dark figures out pretty quickly that zipping Orion around the globe for a quick tour of how night works might be his best play here. Think “Take Your Kid To Work Day” but with more Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou of “What We Do in the Shadows”), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Insomnia (Nat Faxon) and Quiet (Aparna Nancherla). This is where Charmatz’s production really starts to feel like “Inside Out” these elements are all working behind the scenes together not unlike those emotions from the Pixar film we all know so well but “Orion and the Dark” never slips into feeling like an echo or carving its own path alongside one.
One of the ways Kaufman does this is by embedding a story within a story. Eventually, “Orion and the Dark” zooms out to show an adult version of the character (Colin Hanks) telling his daughter about the night he spent with the Dark. Is he making it up to ease her fear of the dark? Or did it really happen? And how can she make it her own? This is where things might get a little twisted for young audiences, but Kaufman and Charmatz once again thread their film through that needle they let it get weird and surreal without sacrificing its emotional core.
There are too many scenes of Orion and Dark zipping across the sky, and I didn’t love some of the music choices. There’s also if you can believe it kind of an overabundance of ideas once Dark gets his own emotional arc and both Orion and his future daughter become superheroes. It feels like a season’s worth of TV concepts stuffed into one movie, but when was the last time you saw a new cartoon that had too much going on in one story? It was probably a Pixar film.
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