Orion and the Dark Animates a Children’s Book by Way of Charlie Kaufman

A children’s movie written by Charlie Kaufman; that’s a sentence that reads like a wry joke in a movie written by Charlie Kaufman (I’m Thinking of Ending Things). But it’s actually a real thing. Kaufman has adapted Emma Yarlett’s preschool picture book, Orion and the Dark, into Netflix’s animated film of the same name. And let me tell you, Orion and the Dark is the most Kaufman-esque children’s movie you could possibly imagine, replete with oodles of existential anxiety, a metafiction narrative and a surprisingly emotional payoff. 

If Kaufman were to ever admit that he basically conscripted Yarlett’s simple tale—of Dark hanging out with a kid who is afraid of him—as a conduit to write a semi-autobiographical expose of how neurotic little Charlie grew up to be the screenwriter we know and love today, I would not be surprised. Luckily, his script found the perfect animation collaborators in first-time director Sean Charmatz, production designer Tim Lamb and art director Christine Bian who have created a visual landscape that translates the writer’s weirdness into something charming and digestible for both kids and adults. 

The most consequential change from the source material is that Kaufman ages up Orion (Jacob Tremblay) from a preschooler to an elementary schooler, which gives the kid necessary agency and life experience. Orion pulls us into his endless anxiety spiral of an existence by detailing the depth and breadth of fears that he obsesses over in a typical day. Inside a sketchbook, Orion doodles everything that stresses him out, from angry bees and bullies, to making eye contact with his classmate crush, Sally. While the film is primarily rendered in a cartoony, CGI animation style, Orion’s interior life is expressed, much like in Yarlett’s book, with mixed-medium illustrations and stick-figure animations. Not only are they a welcome break from the CGI style, but the hand drawn works are a direct conduit to young Orion’s interior world that is constantly churning with fraught thoughts and feelings. 

Despite his almost debilitating list of things to avoid (which does get to be a bit much at times), Orion comes across as a nice kid. He’s got loving but patience-tapped parents (Carla Gugino and Matt Dellapina) who encourage him to not let fear rule his life. But even they have a last straw, when they find Orion’s field trip permission slip buried in the couch. They want him to go, and give him the weekend to come to grips with the positives of attending. 

When they put him to bed (after many attempts by Orion to delay) and the lights go out due to a storm, Orion reveals his ultimate fear: The dark. And when it arrives on this particular night, Dark (Paul Walter Hauser doing his best Seth Rogen) materializes as a corporeal Night Entity. As a frequent observer of Orion’s nightly freak-outs, Dark has finally had it with the kid painting him as a monster. Affronted by one more kid assuming he’s the worst, Dark attempts to reverse Orion’s bias first with a short explainer film narrated by Werner Herzog (pure Kaufman), and then a follow-up invitation to shadow him around the globe for 24 hours to see that there’s nothing to be afraid about.

At this point, most tween-centric animated films would embark on a chipper adventure of discovery with Dark and Orion. The old soul whippersnapper even mocks that cliche formula, which opens the door for Kaufman and crew to instead commit to his signature nesting-doll storytelling, introducing an additional layer to the narrative that broadens the film in interesting directions. 

But the main throughline is that Dark has his work cut out for him in getting Orion to appreciate anything about the specialness of the world at night. Desperate, he brings in his fellow Night Entity coworkers for support: Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), the cute sprite Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel) and the neurotic Insomnia (Nat Faxon). Individually, they elicit a variety of night-induced activities to help or hinder humans as they sleep. But all of them get pretty riled up as Orion’s peak anxiety throws them off their games. While the sequences that illustrate what the Entities do every night are witty and clever, in general they feel derivatively similar to the Emotions in Disney’s Inside Out. While they all get that Kaufman patina of oddness, conceptually they are the least original aspect of the film. 

On the other hand, the relationship between Orion and Dark evolves through a variety of emotional beats that provide opportunities for deep conversations—where they share their nagging fears and self-worth issues—that are definitely not talking down to kids (or their parents). It’s refreshingly honest in expressing the vulnerabilities that we all struggle with regarding our individual anxieties, and is territory that hasn’t really been trod in quite this way in this medium before. And that also applies to Kaufman’s resolutions to some of the twistier concepts introduced, which ultimately earn several glassy-eyed moments in the last 20 minutes. 

There are some stumbles, mostly because the film tries to do too much—especially in the last act. Dark’s “nemesis,” Light (Ike Barinholtz), is underdeveloped and ends up being the slightest character in the piece. There’s also an over-the-top action setpiece ripped right from Poltergeist that is overdone and overlong in comparison to the more deftly constructed elements about family and storytelling that Orion and the Dark introduces and lands quite well. But by film’s end, you won’t question that Kaufman has pulled off a kid’s movie without compromising his unique voice, and you might just feel like you know the artist a little better too.

Director: Sean Charmatz
Writers: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Jacob Tremblay, Paul Walter Hauser, Angela Bassett, Colin Hanks, Natasia Demetriou, Nat Faxon, Ike Barinholtz, Carla Gugino
Release Date: February 2, 2024 (Netflix)

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen