Charlie Kaufman’s first stint in animation was like the rest of his cinematography — strange, neurotic, deeply intelligent. Anomalisa (2015) concentrated in 90 minutes of stop motion all the obsessions of the screenwriter and director – daily monotony, loneliness, psychological disorders, memory and mortality – culminate in an incredible philosophical exercise to force the subject-spectator to probe the limits of his mind.
Mix that with the colorful, magical and sanitized universe of DreamWorks studios, and you get Orion and the Darkan animated film that will amuse and thrill young ones, in addition to offering a multitude of winks to their parents.
Orion, 13, is a shy, lonely, withdrawn and particularly anxious pre-teen. Constantly plagued by fear, he fears dogs, bee stings, oceans, cell phone waves, murderous gutter clowns, school lockers, bullies and the girl he is for. secretly has a crush — he will even refuse a school trip to the Planetarium in order to avoid a confrontation with the stranger.
However, the thing that scares him more than anything is the darkness. Every evening, when his parents put him to bed, he is haunted by the slightest sound, and by all the monsters that inhabit his imagination.
Tired of hearing him moan and scream night after night, Dark, a creature responsible for the darkness, visits him and invites him to accompany him on a tour around the world to show him all the beauties and spectacular entities — Sleep, Insomnia, Silence, Unexplained Noises and Beautiful Dreams — which make the night magical.
A story of a kid who overcomes adversity, all the more standard, had it not been for Charlie Kauffman, champion of mise en abyme, who concocts a multi-generational structure carried by the infinite expansion of the imagination, narrative and science fiction.
The screenwriter also visibly enjoys himself by multiplying the solipsistic remarks and references to David Foster Wallace, Werner Herzog (this passage is particularly successful) and even Nicholas Ray, which can delight as well as exasperate.
When directing, Sean Charmatz does not reinvent the wheel, taking inspiration from the film Inside Out (2015) to offer an anthropomorphic personality to abstract concepts, but punctuates everything with hand drawing which elevates the whole, in addition to adding a touch of humor.
If Orion and the Dark stands out, it is perhaps by the obstinacy of its creators to trust children, to mock with them the recurring motifs in the stories intended for them and to embrace all their most existential questions. Refreshing.