Orion and the Dark review – Charlie Kaufman surprises with Netflix kids’ animation – The Guardian
A mainstream kids’s film from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, creator of Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York? It must be value a glance, if just for the pleasure of questioning how a lot of his personal grownup neurosis has crept in. For this DreamWorks/Netflix household animation, Kaufman has tailored an image e-book by Falmouth-based British creator Emma Yarlett, and Sean Charmatz makes his characteristic directing debut, having labored mainly on storyboarding movies similar to SpongeBob SquarePants and The Lego Film 2.
It’s about an sad little child referred to as Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), who’s afraid of just about the whole lot: placing his hand up in school, being bullied, inflicting the bathroom to overflow with an excessive bowel motion, speaking to the woman he’s secretly in love with – and particularly the darkish. However one evening, the Darkish himself (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser) swoops grumpily into his bed room: an unlimited, cloaked determine with face shrouded beneath a hood. The Darkish insists on taking Orion on a magical night-flight throughout Stygian landscapes to show that it isn’t so unhealthy, and introduces him to 5 Pixar-abstract-type personae friends together with Insomnia (Nat Faxon), accountable for protecting individuals awake with insidious little ideas, and Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel) doing the identical factor with sudden banging and thumping. Then again Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), Candy Goals (Angela Bassett) and Sleep (Natasia Demetriou) are dedicated to serving to you fall asleep.
It’s a sweet-natured little story, indebted to Monsters Inc and the entire Pixar canon however saved from being predictable with different borrowings (Again to the Future, Inception), in addition to its numerous metafictional ranges of storytelling. So is Kaufman’s coronary heart actually on this? Generally I imagined I heard his gloomy soliloquy-whisper about what he has to do to get a paycheque lately. Nicely … possibly he’s extra soft-hearted than we thought.
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