In the closing moments of Charlie Kaufman’s previous movie, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, an old, nude janitor stalked the school hallways while a pig afflicted with maggots babbled on about physics. Certainly not his most recent work, a kid-friendly animation from the creators of The Boss Baby, is that.
Nevertheless, this is still unmistakably a Charlie Kaufman movie. Though Sean Charmatz, a rookie director, is handling the directorial duties, Kaufman’s signature style is evident in a matter of minutes. Our protagonist Orion, who was portrayed by Colin Hanks as an adult and Jacob Tremblay as a child, is a quintessential Kaufman protagonist, characterized by a long list of fears, including those of bees, dogs, the ocean, “murderous gutter clowns,” and most importantly, the dark.
Similar to the endearing children’s book of the same name written and illustrated by British novelist and illustrator Emma Yarlett, which serves as the basis for the movie, Orion eventually encounters ‘Dark,’ a ghostly embodiment of gloom (voiced by a gregarious Paul Walter Hauser), and he must face his anxieties. Surprisingly, though, Kaufman’s writing admits that there’s more to this than just that one clear lesson. Yarlett’s book was written with preschoolers in mind and was only forty pages long. This movie takes those basic concepts and runs with them, incorporating a wacky meta framing device that looks at the process of storytelling itself, among other things.
This joint is a Kaufman joint to the bones.
DreamWorks Animation deserves recognition for their willingness to violate convention, as demonstrated by previous films such as The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. This film features numerous daring swings. Kaufman’s script contains references and jokes that are too sophisticated for five-year-olds. For example, at one point, Orion is seen reading a book titled “Nihilism Vs. Existentialism For Kids.” Another cheeky joke makes fun of other animation studios and their love of “dance parties.” Finally, there is an improbable highbrow joke about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
In keeping with Dreamworks’s signature computer-generated imagery aesthetic, Charmatz’s direction adopts a rough, scrappy aesthetic that reflects the hero’s mindset in a way reminiscent of The Mitchells Vs. The Machines: Orion’s hand-drawn scrapbook sketches, which chronicle his numerous anxieties, artfully spill into the frame. From a conceptual standpoint, everything has a hint of Inside Out by Pixar in the way it anthropomorphizes abstract concepts (but not nearly as successfully); colorful supporting characters like “Sleep,” “Insomnia,” and “Unexplained Noises” are present.
But at its core, this is a Kaufman film, and if it has a peculiar sweetness and a clearly genuine father-daughter bond, it is also packed with enormous ideas, existential dread, and a strong distaste for anything overly tidy or Hollywood. We should be happy that a big studio has let someone like him into the secure world of kid-friendly movies; kids should see more of his gloomy works.