Netflix and DreamWorks talk about their new film “Orion and the Dark” and how it uses different motivating strategies to keep the audience captivated. The creators were wise enough to use the blueprint Pixar created in their films “Inside Out” and “Toy Story”. The difference is that rather than just copying, the creators at DreamWorks have put their unique spin by including a heart-warming narrative of a boy seeking safety in this dangerous world. It is filled with great character description, witty conversation, and great morals, “Orion and the Dark” is a jaw-dropping surprise for everyone who subscribes to Netflix.
To understand why the plot of ‘Orion and the Dark’ seems oddly subversive for a family film, one would have to consider its author, the same man who gave us “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich.” There are not many cartoons which feature David Foster Wallace or Saul Bass’s names, and that is only in the prologue. In that witty opening that is almost like a short film by itself, Kaufman and first-time director Sean Charmatz set up the premise of the story featuring Orion, played by Jacob Tremblay, who is an elementary school student who lives in America and has a phobia of almost everything. The list includes bullies, bees, and yes, falling out of skyscrapers. Terrorizing is pretty much Orion’s speciality. But the thing that scares him the most is the ordinary, mundane fixture of life, which is the dark.
After his overly reassuring parents (Carla Gugino & Matt Dellapina) have told him everything is alright, Orion meets the Dark, personified by the great Paul Walter Hauser who effortlessly oscillates between boisterous and fragile, and to whom the audience shifts throughout the film. His performance here is a case of how much an actor can bring life to a feature-length animated film if only they do not approach it with a laid-back attitude. He seemed to have given himself an impossible task but managed to achieve it by giving it a touch of realism. What if the Dark was somewhat like Orion? He too suffers from the anxiety of being superfluous and ignored. This is evident in the reason everyone adores the Light (Ike Barinholtz), who in this case is the figurative representation of Superman as opposed to Dark’s Batman, in that he is far more adventurously noble, and not so self-consciously sullen.
The Dark reasons that the easiest way to get Orion to not fear him is to do just that step to work with your parent type of scenario and fly the excess around the globe to witness how night operates, which includes him meeting Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou from “What We Do in the Shadows”), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Insomnia (Nat Faxon), and Quiet (Aparna Nancherla). This is the point where Charmetz’s production truly begins to feel almost as if you are watching “Inside Out”. This fact keeps “Orion and the Dark” from ever feeling like a copy. Instead of taking the same route, it creates a parallel lane for itself.
Kaufman does this in one of the more complex ways by complicating a story with another story. At one point, “Orion and the Dark” zooms out to show the adult version (played by Colin Hanks) recounting to his daughter his dramatic encounter with the Dark. Is he trying to soothe her fear of the dark by lying? Or did it actually happen? And how is the daughter supposed to claim ownership of the story? This is where the younger ones may start to get a bit lost, but once again, Kaufman and Charmatz work to bridge the gaps, letting the film be a bit disjointed and strange without cutting the core emotional components.
There is a little too much Dark and Orion speeding across the horizon and a few track choices that I did not buy into. There is also, if you can believe it, what feels like too many ideas after Dark gets his own emotional arc and both Orion and his daughter-in-the-future become protagonists. The amount of ideas packed into one script could easily rival that of a single season of a TV show. When was the last time you watched a new animated film and thought they tried to cram too much action into one movie? The answer is probably a Pixar movie.
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