Orion and the Dark

dir: Sean Charmatz

2024

It is a relief for me to have watched and be reviewing a movie in which Charlie Kaufman has some involvement (in the screenplay), and to not be talking about what a disappointment it is, and how the great promise of his early scripts has given way to current and future dread.

But I can unequivocally say I enjoyed this flick, probably because Kaufman didn’t direct it.

Orion and the Dark is an animated movie aimed at kids, yes, but that shouldn’t stop people from watching it even if their kids are now too old to enjoy them.

Just, you know, watch it on a streaming service, not on your (adult) own in an actual cinema, like some weirdy weirdo.

No kids, no entry. Anyway, this isn’t even pretending to be top shelf animation with broad four quadrant demographic appeal. It might say “Dreamworks”, but I think they handballed most of the work to a smaller French animation studio, which is fine.

I have no background on this but this feels a lot like something that was made during the various lockdowns by people in their bedrooms / home offices. It doesn’t feel like seamless, streamlined pure product pumped out by an efficient machine, and is the better for it.

As such it’s not trying to push the technical boundaries of CGI animation whatsoever. All the quality is in the script and the vocal performances, which I thought were really solid. Especially since they somehow and somewhy roped in Werner Herzog for a brief and baffling moment.

And what is it about?

It’s about a kid called Orion who’s anxious about everything. Absolutely everything. And it’s not just a charming level of neuroticism (if such a thing still exists, or ever existed), it’s a paralysing, crippling level of anxiety.

It’s overwhelming, and it impedes his ability to enjoy life, and it impedes his understanding but exhausted parents, who also don’t get to sleep.

I can feel the warmth being generated by multiple people rolling their eyes with force, and that’s okay. It’s not a rarely depicted character. Kid characters are often depicted like this, by adults who want to argue that kids are annoying, full stop. And if there’s a group of kids as the protagonists, one of them is usually depicted as the annoyingly anxiety-ridden one, who’s also usually a momma’s boy and a hypochondriac.

It’s a familiar trope, because it’s a familiar trait in people.

The difference here is that it’s treated seriously. I don’t mean just that within the context of the movie people are deadly serious about it, I mean that the makers and the story itself takes a child’s fears and says “it’s okay that you have these fears – these fears are understandable even if they’re overwhelming.”

The flick never says “snap out of it” or “have you tried not being anxious?” as if it’s a choice rather than a state and an involuntary reaction. And especially since this is aimed, respectfully, at kids, it says neither that they’ll grow out of it, or that being afraid of stuff is just a childish stage they’ll go through.

Orion’s biggest fear (apart from basically everything that he can imagine going wrong) is of the dark. And it just so happens that The Dark appears as an anthropomorphic being, called, conveniently, Dark (Paul Walter Hauser). It won’t surprise you, perhaps, that Dark, despite his fearsome appearance, is himself friendly and kind. He knows there are many who are terrified of him, and though that doesn’t sit well with him, he still does what he needs to do, which is blanket the world in darkness to allow so many natural processes to occur.

Of course, because this is animation, he has a rogue’s gallery of hangers-on who also do their thing at night: Sleep (Natasia Demetriou) who knocks people the fuck out, Dreams (Angela Bassett), Quiet (Aparna Nancherla) and Insomnia (Nat Faxon). It’s less a formidable group of Endless or Eternals, and more some ways of filling out the roster and reminding people of Inside Out just a little bit.

I mean, it’s pretty hard to see what universal and vital purpose Unexplained Night Noises (Golda Rosheuval) makes other than being annoying, but here she is anyway.

Or Insomnia, either, who can fuck right off. But that’s just me bitching about my own personal demons…

Meeting none of these beings comforts Orion at all, and in fact everything he does out of his profound fears, including pervasive thoughts of his own mortality, disrupts everything that they try to do. Though he does eventually see in Dark something of a kindred spirit, or at least someone he can relate to somewhat, when he meets Light (Ike Barinholtz in full on smug asshole mode), he starts thinking Light is where it’s at, and tries to ditch Dark completely.

Bloody kids. Soon as someone likes them, they take them for granted, ditch them and them climb the social hierarchy.

So saddened by the betrayal, so appalled at being abandoned by even his other night denizens, Dark pretty much commits suicide and disintegrates.

Um, hello? Is this thing still on? I may be spoiling things, but I am not making things up.

Is this still a kids flick? Well, what I’ve left out is that it’s a story within a story within another story, and we only really find out exactly who is telling which story and to whom at the very end. But before that we realise that the person telling the story is Orion as an adult (Colin Hanks), and he’s telling the story to his daughter Hypatia (Mia Akemi Brown), because she is the one who’s afraid of the dark now, and is doing anything to avoid having to go to sleep.

Which reminded me of just how wry / pretentious the flick is in parts – the younger Orion tries to convince his dad to read him a loooong bedtime story, and picks a large book up, with the dad sighing and saying something like “now is not the time for David Foster Wallace”, which did genuinely make me laugh, because it means the book Orion picked up was probably Infinite Jest

So someone might say: well, it’s just a story then, made up shit: It’s artifice upon artifice, and it alienates the audience. Boo, BOO! I BOO what you’re doing!

And someone can be entitled to their arsehole opinion. I like how the story changes based on either what Orion is trying to say, or what his daughter Hypatia thinks a real story really needs. She doesn’t want easy, pat answers to her fears. And beyond what Orion is trying to convince her of, which is that he, too, had a lot of anxiety as a kid, there’s a throughline through the multiple levels upon which the story works that pulls it together in a way that feels meaningful.

He’s also willing and able to change the story as what they both need changes, over time, within the context of the same story. He prioritises her wellbeing over what he might really, really want (for her to Go the Fuck to Sleep! Please, for the love of God). And that’s solid Dad-work right there.

We don’t conquer our fears, we don’t stab them or smother them, or necessarily embrace them: we get to a point where we acknowledge our fears and do stuff anyway.

From the beginning to the end there is the question, somehow, of whether Orion was ever going to work up the courage to allow himself to go on a field trip to a planetarium on a particular Monday, and whether he was ever going to allow himself to talk to a girl called Sally (Shino Nakamichi).

It seems so minor, so innocuous. It’s only at the very end, when we find out that it’s not even Orion actually telling the story, but Hypatia herself, that the overall structure makes perfect sense, and also, we sigh contentedly when we have our answer as to whether he went to the planetarium all those years ago or not.

Maybe I’m just particularly defenceless against certain types of animated movies, but this struck me as a particularly thoughtful and enjoyable one. The animation is not going to win any awards, people aren’t going to rave about it (like they used to whenever a new Pixar movie came out), but I enjoyed it and teared up a lot as well. Which is, I dunno, a good thing I suppose?

7 times I swear I never fell asleep reading a story to my kid ever ever out of 10

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“In real life, when you're dead, you're dead. The realization that there's no way around it terrifies me. I try to imagine what death is like. I've concluded it's like nothing. This is black and silent, not nothing. Blackness and silence is something. Nothing is perhaps the one unimaginable thing.” – fun for the whole depressed family - Orion and the Dark