ANI-MOVIES, *Orion And The Dark

French studio Mikros Animation worked their magic to make DreamWorks' Orion And The Dark come to life. Based on Emma Yarlett's book, this was adapted by Charlie Kaufman who most would remember from writing Being John Malkovich. The plot is a mixture of Inside Out, The Princess Bride, and Inception as it leaves the viewer wondering if they're watching a dream or a story being narrated with numerous clues as to who was actually telling it. The film starts out seeming like a generic all-ages fantasy, but as it going on it totally beats subversion which you don't even realize until the conclusion. Even the character designs look like Pixar knockoffs, however by the end it helps push the believable logic used into the overall theme of imagination.

Orion has a crippling anxiety of nearly everything, mainly trying to fit in at school and working up the courage to talk to a girl he likes for their field trip to a planetarium. He's especially afraid of the dark, so that evening he gets visited by Dark itself which is a living spirit responsible for bringing darkness to the world to roll in the night along with the rest of his crew. The night entities consist of Quiet, Sleep, Insomnia, Sweet Dreams, and Unexplained Noises who all look like rejected Jim Henson creations, but they each play their parts helping humans operate in nighttime. Dark takes Orion on a tour of the world trying him to get over his fears of the dark and other sources of his anxiety which he slightly does, but his comparison of how good things are in the light make the other entities quit their jobs and Dark ultimately letting himself get extinguished by Light which is his sunny counterpart tasked with bringing light into the world. Along the way, we learn that this entire tale is being told by an adult Orion to his young daughter Hypatia looking for inspiration for writing a poem, so Hypatia resolves the story's bummer ending with a deux ex machina by having herself somehow go back in time to help her younger father. Hypatia gathers the other night entities and goes into Orion's mind to find what's left of Dark and restore darkness to the world. The snag in this is that now Hypatia is stuck in the past with her father as a boy with no way to get back to her own time, at least until the convenient time traveler Tycho comes to take her back to the future. This ends with Tycho turning out to be Hypatia's son from even further in the future who is being told the multi-generational story down from his grandfather to his mother and now to him. The older Orion thinks back to his days at school where we see his younger self finally getting the nerve to go on his field trip and talk to the girl he likes.

Orion And The Dark goes from a child dealing with anxiety, similar to Diary Of A Wimpy Kid, and then becomes a groundbreaking fairy tale shifting from one person's perspective to another throughout the ages. The perspective of who is telling the story and how it's being interpreted by the listener for once clearly defined for this who can keep up with its accounting. The narrative can get a little wonky, but if you're seeing it from the point of view a child being told a bedtime story from their parent allows a child's imagination to go into overdrive. Being told the typical "Happily Ever After" can become repetitive, so passing the story over to another generation is an inspired idea. The animation can seem like simple CGI at first, but as the story goes along the quality gets surprisingly better when Orion is off on his nocturnal adventure. The overall message of overcoming your fears and how you can still battle them into your adulthood makes it relatable and open to all ages.