Image via Dreamworks Animation
When we think of children’s entertainment these days, we think of safe, board-approved parables that help kids realize their potential while teaching them just how beautifully diverse the world is. We’re not thinking of John Malkovich’s face plastered on every customer in a restaurant, or Nicolas Cage watching NSFW videos in a fatsuit. Scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman gave us these indelible images in Being John Malkovich And Adaptationand now he’s going to give kids something they’ll probably never forget with Dreamworks Animation Orion and the Darkness.
By DeadlineDreamworks said on Tuesday it is teaming up with Netflix to produce the CG animated film, which will be released on the streamer in 2024. The film is an adaptation of a book by Emma Yarlett, about an elementary-age boy named Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) who is afraid of many things in life, but especially the dark.
Then, Dark Personified (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser) visits the boy and takes him around the world to prove there’s nothing particularly terrible about the night. Or, knowing Kaufman’s jet-black sense of humor, the message will sound more like “there’s nothing particularly terrible in the night that isn’t so terrible in 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 Variety, Dreamworks screened three excerpts from the film in progress 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]Phone waves give me cancers, saying hello, bees, dogs, ocean.
Agree, that sounds a lot like Kaufman, who also wrote Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and made the stop-motion animation He is illthat some parents assumed was a kids movie because it’s animated and found they were horribly, horribly wrong.
Additionally, Kaufman led the pandemic downer I’m thinking of ending things for Netflix, which would explain the involvement of the streamer 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, it might be best to take a chance with the art. without drive the parents to the theatre.