Dark Fantasy

Why Orion And The Dark is a children's story unlike any other 

- JACK SHEPHERD

SOMEWHERE IN THE multiverse, there exists a version of Orion And The Dark that’s a straightforward retelling of Emma Yarlett’s adorable picture book – a simple story about a boy who’s scared of the dark but ends up befriending a mysterious entity that embodies the night. This is not that universe.

“You give that book to 99.9% of the other screenwriters in Hollywood, you get that version of the film,” says producer Peter McCown. “Charlie Kaufman just takes it to a different level.”

Yes, he’s talking about that Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Considering that his last animated feature, the stop-motion film Anomalisa – about a supermarket worker who believes everyone else in the world is the same person – was described as an “obsessive drama about human suffering” by Time, Kaufman doesn’t seem like an obvious match for Orion.

And yet Netflix’s animation works wonderfully well, going far beyond Yarlett’s 40-page parable about why darkness isn’t really very scary (a scattering of Amazon reviews indicate that it’s particularly good for helping put children to bed).