‘Orion and the Dark’ Is ‘Inside Out’ for Anxious Insomniacs
It’s easy for children to be feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world. (To be fair, it’s also easy for a lot of adults to feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world, which, you know — thank god for therapists!) You could do a lot worse than to show a fretful youngster Orion and the Dark, a Dreamworks/Netflix animated movie that mounts a full-frontal attack on the notion of fear as a default state of mind. Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is an 11-year-old who’s afraid of a lot of things: cancer, clowns, dogs, drowning, heights, bees, clogging the school toilet, and then getting called out on it. Humiliation is, unsurprisingly, a big one for this middle-schooler. Bullies? Bad, very bad. Talking to his crush? Even worse.
One of Orion’s main phobias, however, revolves around the dark. Like a lot of nervous kids, he’s not a fan. Bedtime is a struggle. Why do his parents (Carla Gugino and Matt Dellapina) have to ixnay him from constantly waking them up in the middle of the night? And what’s wrong with reading him long selections from a David Foster Wallace novel before turning off the lights? Once Orion is forced to deal with his inevitable pre-slumber bout of terror, he imagines all sorts of things lurking in the shadows, ready to slither out and devour him.
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Then something does come bursting out of his closet. It’s the Dark (Paul Walter Hauser, doing what sounds like a manic Seth Rogen impression). A manifestation of the inky blackness that characterizes the wee small hours and blessed with both eyes and teeth, this embodiment of Orion’s fear of the unknown is actually a bit of a mensch. No reason to be afraid of me, he says. Tell you what, li’l guy! Why don’t you come with me and watch me do my job? Then you’ll realize there’s nothing to be scared of. Before the trembling boy can respond between teeth-chattering fits, the two fly out into the night. Soon, he’ll also meet Dark’s nocturnal coworkers: Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou), Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett, very much doing the thing), Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), and Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel).
The misadventures that follow play like Inside Out for anxious insomniacs, as Orion rides shotgun while this gang of R.E.M.-cycle mavericks either lull folks into a restful state or aggressively knock them out . (Sleep is not above using a pillow, a hammer or chloroform to achieve her goal.) An attempt to make a case for daylight to this Dream Team — oh, the things you’ll see! — ends up alienating Dark, and then threatens to snuff him out altogether. At which point the movie switches into Inception mode, as Orion’s new friends help him dive deep into his own unconscious in order to restore the natural balance of things. When we say that the movie provides its own nightmare fodder, we mean it literally.
Orion and the Dark’s first half looks and feels like it might have come from any high-concept animated movie of the past few decades, complete with celebrity voices, life lessons, and the kind of rubbery, bubbly character bodies we associate with digitally rendered ‘toons. It’s very Pixar-lite, which still makes it better than a lot of its peers. Yet there are a few random bits of absurdity — notably Dark’s 20-second, self-promotional short film, narrated by Werner Herzog and with titles by Saul Bass — that remind you that though the film is directed by longtime storyboard/sketch artist Sean Charmatz, it’s written by Charlie Kaufman. This becomes even more apparent once the movie occasionally flashes forward to an adult Orion (Colin Hanks) relaying the story we’re watching to his daughter, Hypatia (Mia Akemi Brown). Except Dad doesn’t know how the story ends. So, naturally, Hypatia has to enter the tale herself and help her then-tween father figure things out, which causes its own problems, and….
What starts an as adaptation of Emma Yarlett’s popular 2014 children’s book transforms itself yet again, and the temptation to simply dub the wonderfully goofy, shockingly moving result Eternal Nighttime of the Restless Mind is simply too good to pass up. Orion only had to be a decent enough take on a boy overcoming his status as a first-rate scaredy cat and realizing that the world isn’t all worst-case scenarios. The fact that it adds an ode to intergenerational storytelling, a parody of time-travel narratives, some oddball left-turns, and a near-transcendent coda that feels very much in line with Kaufman’s body of work — all while still giving the kids what they want — makes this more than a cut above your average rainy-afternoon distraction. It’s really a low-key blast.
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