When we think of children’s entertainment these days, we think of safe, committee-approved parables that help kids realize their potential while teaching them how beautifully diverse the world is. We don’t think of John Malkovich’s face pasted onto every customer in a restaurant, or Nicolas Cage watching NSFW videos in a fatsuit. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gifted us those indelible images in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and now he’s going to give the kiddies something they’ll likely never forget with Dreamworks Animation’s Orion and the Dark.
Per Deadline, Dreamworks said Tuesday that it’s teaming up with Netflix to produce the CG-animated film, which will drop on the streamer sometime in 2024. The film is an adaptation of a book by Emma Yarlett, about an elementary-aged boy named Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) who is afraid of a lot of things in life, but especially the dark.
Then, Dark personified (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser) visits the boy and whisks him around the world to prove there’s nothing especially terrible about the night. Or, knowing Kaufman’s jet-black sense of humor, the message will be more akin to “there’s nothing especially terrible about the night that’s not also terrible about the day.” The film is directed by Sean Charmatz, who has story credits on Trolls World Tour and the strangely good Angry Birds Movie 2.
According to Variety, Dreamworks screened three work-in-progress excerpts from the film at the Annecy Animation Festival. The first showed the neurotic young man repeating a list of things he’s afraid of, including, “Rejection, humiliation, murderous gutter clowns” and also “[c]ell phone waves giving me cancers, saying good morning, bees, dogs, the ocean.”
Okay, that actually does sound a lot like Kaufman, who also scribed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and directed the stop-motion-animated Anomalisa, which some parents assumed was a children’s movie because it’s animated and discovered they were horribly, horribly wrong.
In addition, Kaufman directed the pandemic downer I’m Thinking of Ending Things for Netflix, which would explain the streamer’s involvement in this project. Dreamworks Animation isn’t known for sending things straight to streaming, but when you have a firecracker like Kaufman crafting your story, perhaps it’s better to take a chance on art without making parents drive all the way to the theater.