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‘Orion and the Dark’ Review: A Bewildering Cartoon Bedtime Story From the Mind of Charlie Kaufman
What if DreamWorks entrusted Charlie Kaufman to make an animated movie about overcoming one's fear of the dark? The result is as wild as you'd expect.
Dressed in an oversized plague cloak that can stretch the width of the planet as needed, this anthropomorphic fellow seems willing to risk his very existence to explain how the whole dark/light, night/day thing works (with the help of a short filmstrip guest narrated by Werner Herzog). Orion tells us that the school counselor suggested he catalog his fears in a sketchbook, and those colored pencil drawings allow for playfully crude line boil animation vignettes amid the more conventional bobble-headed CG aesthetic director Sean Charmatz chooses for most of the movie (a less interesting look reminiscent of “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius”). As if Kaufman hadn’t convoluted the binary concepts of light and dark, day and night enough, he interrupts this comedic fable at the 17-minute mark to reveal that everything we’ve seen until this point has been a bedtime story told by adult Orion to his daughter, Hypatia (Mia Akemi Brown), who will later join him in trying to figure out how it ends.
Or read this on Variety
