DreamWorks’ ‘Orion and the Dark’: Pixar-level brilliance in storytelling

DreamWorks’ ‘Orion and the Dark’: Pixar-level brilliance in storytelling. “Orion and the Dark” is a collaboration between DreamWorks and Netflix that has been praised for capturing the essence of Pixar, outshining many recent Pixar films in the process.

By Staff

It shamelessly borrows from Pixar’s master notebook to humanize the impossible in films like “Inside Out” and “Toy Story,” which actually directly references the latter in its prologue.

The good news is that it’s based on a template rather than just superficially copying it like so many other Pixar wannabes.

This one hits familiar chords, to be sure, but it works because it combines writer Charlie Kaufman’s unique sense of storytelling with a touching tale of a boy who just wants to feel safe in the world.

With sharp character design, entertaining dialogue, and a positive message, “Orion and the Dark” is a Netflix original surprise early in the year.

You don’t have to know that “Orion and the Dark” was written by the man behind “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich” to sense that the script is a little different for a family film.

It’s not every day that you get a reference to David Foster Wallace or Saul Bass in a cartoon. And that’s just in the prologue.

In that clever opening that’s almost its own short film, Kaufman and director Sean Charmatz, in their debut, introduce Orion (Jacob Tremblay), an elementary school boy who’s afraid of just about everything.

Bullies, bees, falling from skyscrapers, you name it, he’s thought about their terrifying nature. And what he fears most is the common, evolutionary thing called darkness.

One night, after his sympathetic parents (Carla Gugino and Matt Dellapina) have tried to convince him that everything is safe.

Orion meets literal darkness, wonderfully voiced by the great Paul Walter Hauser, who delivers a wonderfully shifting vocal performance from affable to vulnerable throughout the film.

His work here is a reminder of how much an actor can elevate an animated film when he doesn’t view it as just an easy task. He clearly considered the arc of something impossible and made it work by rooting that arc in the familiar.

What if the darkness was like Orion in a way?

He also fears being ignored and not needed in the world. After all, everyone loves the Light (Ike Barinholtz), portrayed here as almost Superman to the more obviously heroic and less naturally grim Batman of Darkness.

The Darkness decides that the best way to make Orion stop fearing it is to basically take him on a “Take Your Child to Work,” taking the protagonist around the world to see how the night works, introducing him to Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou from “What We Do in the Shadows”), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Insomnia (Nat Faxon), and Silence (Aparna Nancherla).

This is where Charmetz’s production really starts to feel like Inside Out, these elements working together behind the scenes in a similar way to the emotions in that Pixar gem, but Orion and the Dark never succumbs to feeling like an echo.

It carves its own parallel path instead of simply taking the same path.

One of the ways it does this is so Kaufman in that he chooses to embed a story within a story.

After a while, “Orion and the Dark” cuts back to reveal an adult version of the character (Colin Hanks) telling the story of his fateful night with the Dark to his daughter.

Is he making it up to calm his fears of the dark?

Or did it really happen? And how can your daughter make the story her own?

This is where little ones might get a little confused, but Kaufman and Charmatz again spin the needle, allowing their film to get a little twisted and surreal without ever losing the emotional threads.

There are some shots of Orion and Dark whizzing across the horizon, and some musical choices that didn’t quite work for me.

There is also, believe it or not, what seems to be an overabundance of ideas once the Darkness has its own emotional arc and both Orion and his future daughter become heroes.

It almost feels like a season’s worth of television’s worth of concepts compressed into a single script.

Although, when was the last time you saw a new cartoon that felt like it had too much in one movie? It was probably a Pixar movie.

On Netflix now.