Orion and the Dark

ORION AND THE DARK   **1/2

Sean Charmatz

2024

IDEA:  Fearful 11-year-old Orion is met one night by the Dark, who attempts to prove that there's no reason to be scared of him by taking the boy on a journey around the world.

BLURB:  You could certainly do a lot worse than Orion in the Dark in the current oversaturated, undernourishing landscape of mainstream children’s media. The film has a welcome maturity and depth owed to the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, whose existentialist sensibilities and propensity for meta-narrative structural trickery are points of inspiration amid the more routine kids’-film tropes. Orion is most effective when it zeroes in on its protagonist’s anxieties, a grab bag of irrational fears that should strike a chord for anyone (child or adult) prone to catastrophic thinking. Using sketchbook doodles and a panicked internal monologue, Kaufman, Charmatz, the animators, and lead actor Jacob Tremblay handle this material with both powerful sincerity and a necessary sense of detached jokiness. This is all before Orion even introduces its other main character, the personified Dark. While the anthropomorphic figure of fear (and his ragtag team of nocturnal associates) are the raison d’être of the film, their entrance inaugurates muddy, overwrought plotting that labors under the weight of its High Concept. It doesn’t help that the character and environment design are mostly unappealing, lacking the detail and pictorial grandeur to match the scope of the film’s themes. Orion is still sweet and moving, and offers valuable lessons for children, but it also feels more than faintly like a budget Pixar knockoff just happy to say it’s better than Trolls: World Tour.