In today’s era of mass-production of animated movies after their global box office success rates, movies are often made for their marketability. Despite that, 2024’s Orion and the Dark arrived on Netflix as something completely unexpected. Written by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman, the author of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it appears to be another story about overcoming one’s fear. Leaning into it, though, it compels one to discover profound themes emerging through DreamWorks brilliant illustrations and production.
The Dual Timelines Converge
We follow the magical journey of Orion (Jacob Tremblay), a young schooler who has a terribly long list of things around him that give him anxiety. These include talking to his crush, haircuts, the anticipated fear of bleak nothingness awaiting him after death, and, on top of that list is the dark. One night, he comes face-to-face with a most frightening scenario as Dark appears before him personified (Paul Walter Hauser). To his surprise, Dark is both funny and friendly and offers to spend 24 hours with him to suppress his fear. Reluctant to this journey initially, little Orion is positively bewildered over the Dark’s mystical ways of creating the nighttime.
He also gets introduced to Dark’s friends, other night entities including Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou), Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Quiet, and Unexplained Noises. But as we’re leaning into it as a sweet childhood fantasy film, it is revealed that this story is being narrated by adult Orion (Colin Hanks) to his daughter Hypatia in a true Kaufman style. The fear has now evolved, and it has translated into a narrative about how parents shield their kids from anxieties they endured as a child themselves.
Hand-Drawn Illustrative Animation
Production designer Tim Lamb and art director Christine Bian animated the film in the most wondrous way possible. They preserve the whimsical illustrations to honor its picture book author Emma Yarlett, rejecting CG. It took inspiration from early Wes Anderson films and the midwestern suburbia of Jason Reitman’s Juno to create something more unique and true to its art. Visual effects supervisor M. Scott McKee shared how they created the Dark Bringer of light through dropping ink on paper and recording its ebbs and flows each time.
The Profound Cultural Impact
What makes the film one of a kind is the way it handles childhood dread and adult existential fears simultaneously as two sides of the same coin. Its cultural impact lies in its challenging the existing contemporary animated line-ups and questioning what children’s movies really are. More than just a fantasy flight, Orion and the Dark presents itself as a layered, complex, metafictional piece about how storytelling itself becomes a coping mechanism against our fears. It also touches on the sensitive theme of emotional healing. Hypatia intervenes in the story and helps her father figure out the right kind of ending, suggesting how healing truly occurs when you have the courage to expose your fears to the ones you trust.
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