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Feb 2, 2024 · A boy who fears the dark meets the literal Dark, a character voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, and learns about the world of night in this animated film by Charlie Kaufman. The review praises the storytelling, the dialogue, and the positive messaging, but also notes some flaws and excess ideas.
91% Tomatometer 77 Reviews 61% Audience Score 250+ Ratings The thing Orion fears the most is the dark. When the embodiment of his worst fear pays a visit, Dark whisks Orion away on a...
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- Kids & Family, Comedy, Animation
- Sean Charmatz
Jan 29, 2024 · ‘Orion and the Dark’ Review: Jacob Tremblay and Paul Walter Hauser in Clever Animation Penned by Charlie Kaufman. Angela Bassett and Colin Hanks also feature in the voice cast of this...
Feb 1, 2024 · ‘Orion and the Dark’ Review: Charlie Kaufman Wrote an Animated Kids Movie for Netflix, and the Final Product Is Almost as Good as That Sounds. A neurotic 11-year-old boy spends a night...
- Like if Charlie Kaufman wrote a Pixar movie
- Orion and the Dark Gallery
- What's the best movie written or directed (or written and directed) by Charlie Kaufman
- Verdict
By A.A. Dowd
Posted: Jan 29, 2024 5:00 pm
A few years ago, Charlie Kaufman lost the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This was not exactly a surprising development: The writer-director’s Anomalisa was a stop-motion marvel as strange and depressive as his live-action work – the kind of adult-oriented cartoon that’s lucky to even get nominated. There was, however, some faint irony to the Oscar going instead to Inside Out. After all, don’t most of Kaufman’s movies also plunge audiences into the human brain? Whether by voice-over or a literal portal, they offer guided tours of a tortured psychology. To see arguably the most imaginative screenwriter in Hollywood lose to a Disneyfied version of his whole high-concept deal… it was like a joke from one of his movies, a fate he might dream up.
If Inside Out could be described as Pixar doing Charlie Kaufman, the new animated feature Orion and the Dark is essentially Charlie Kaufman doing Pixar. Technically speaking, the film – which Kaufman wrote but didn’t direct – comes courtesy of rival studio Dreamworks, and is premiering on Netflix. But in its polished spectacle, its anthropomorphizing of abstract concepts, and its aspirations to tug on the heartstrings of kids and adults alike, the project definitely resembles something from the house Woody and Buzz built. And part of its charm rests on seeing the mad genius behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich try to work within the bounds of all-ages formula without being completely consumed by it.
Kaufman’s voice is discernible immediately, thanks to the nervous opening narration of the title character, a grade-schooler plagued by intrusive thoughts. Orion, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, has a laundry list of fears, social and existential – a true diary of a wimpy kid, illustrated via flashes of notebook animation. We could be witnessing a preteen version of the anxiously introverted writer Nicolas Cage played in Adaptation. Which is to say, a young Charlie Kaufman.
It’s the dark that Orion fears most. In its inky depths, he can see the great unknown. “Nothing is perhaps the one unimaginable thing,” he grimly muses. This is around the time parents might start to wonder if they took a wrong turn into Synecdoche, New York with this supposed children’s film. Thankfully, the boy is soon visited by Dark, a.k.a. the talking embodiment of darkness, a burly robed figure who speaks, gregariously, in the voice of Paul Walter Hauser. He’s come to try and free Orion of his terror – to show him that darkness isn’t so scary, if only to quell the kid’s loud and distracting nightly panic.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Being John Malkovich
Anomalisa
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Other. Tell us in the comments.
As written and performed, Dark is basically Wreck-It Ralph done up like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Being hated and feared has given him a serious inferiority complex. As Orion semi-willingly accompanies him on his beat turning the world from day to night, we’re introduced to Dark’s coworkers, the metaphysical night shift: a mouse named Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), the living source of all unexplained noises (Golda Rosheuvel), a weaver of dreams voiced by Angela Bassett, etc. This very Inside Out cavalry could be funnier in personality and more inventive in general appearance. Mostly, they underscore the telling tendency of big animated movies (especially Pixar’s, but not just) to create oversized metaphors for workplaces, conspicuously populated by tired, cranky clockwatchers.
Charlie Kaufman follows the ingenious head-scratcher I’m Thinking of Ending Things with a very different kind of Netflix movie: a storybook adaptation about a perpetually anxious little boy who meets the physical manifestation of his greatest fear, darkness. In many respects, Orion and the Dark plays like the screenwriter’s work-for-hire version of...
- A.A. Dowd
Orion and the Dark Reviews. All Critics. Top Critics. All Audience. Verified Audience. Lee Zumpe Tampa Bay Newspapers. “Orion and the Dark” is surprisingly effective in conveying...
Feb 1, 2024 · Orion and the Dark is a 2024 film based on a picture book by Emma Yarlett, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Sean Charmatz. It follows a boy who faces his fears with the help of his dark, a mysterious entity voiced by Paul Walter Hauser.
