Netflix and DreamWorks Animation Team Up For Charlie Kaufman's ORION AND THE DARK
DreamWorks Animation and Netflix are teaming up on a CG-animated family adventure film titled Orion and The Dark, which was written by Charlie Kaufman. The movie is based on the 2014 book by Emma Yarlett and it’s described as a “darkly whimsical tale about a young boy confronting his greatest terror.”
The story centers on a boy named Orion (Jacob Tremblay), “an elementary schooler and full-time fraidy cat unnerved by heights, spooked by domestic animals, and rendered nearly catatonic by that worst plight of all – the dark. Only one night the Dark (Paul Walter Hauser) just about has enough, so he takes Orion on a nocturnal adventure to show the boy there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”
The movie is being directed by animator Sean Charmatz, who is making his feature film debut. We also have three images to share with you of the movie.
DreamWorks Animation announced the title at the Annecy Animation Festival where they revealed that it will be released in 2024. They also shared some clips from the movie. Variety offered details on the clips that were shared:
The first clip finds the neurotic young boy going about his day, repeating his voluminous list of fears as if a mantra. “Rejection, humiliation, murderous gutter clowns,” Orion chants. And as the film’s rounded 3D edges turn into rough 2D scribbles found the back of a notebook, the troubled boy continues: “Cell phone waves giving me cancer, saying good morning, bees, dogs, the ocean!”
But of all Orion’s fears, nothing compares to the nightly visitor who greets him once the lights go out. Only our Dark is a garrulous and good-time fellow, so he takes the rejection in stride. “I’m going to get you to overcome your fears if it kills me,” he chides the boy. “And I’m immortal, by the way, so I have all the time in the world.”
Subsequent clips channel Kaufman’s impish sense of humor, dropping in a cameo by (or pitch perfect impression of) Werner Herzog, and hinting at a wider universe full of literalized and embodied late-night phenomena. Other characters swirling around this world include Insomnia, Unexpected Noises and Sleep, who carries her targets off to slumberland by smothering them with a pillow or dousing them with chloroform.
Presented in various stages of completion, the excerpts promise an elegant animation style, especially when depicting the central, non-human character. The Dark is a cloak of black mist, casting a pall of shadow beneath him as he soars the night sky and shimmying around the beam of a flashlight with surprising agility once Orion tries to chase him away.
I’m looking forward to watching this movie. With Kaufman writing the script, we know the story is going to be solid, fun, and quirky.
