Orion and the Dark

The visual and narrative magic of this film helps to balance a potentially downbeat reading of a generation of anxious kids who, if Orion is any indication, must be taught to live. Written by Charlie Kaufman and based on a book by Emma Yarlett, Orion and the Dark makes its target audience clear in the first lines of the film, when its 11-year-old everyman protagonist says, "I'm a kid, just like you." Orion's nail-biting world is quickly revealed as his fears are entertainingly visualized in childlike drawings that leap off the pages of his sketchbook. These scratches are later complemented with soaring animated dreamscapes of competing ghost-like entities spreading light and dark around the globe, over varied landscapes, towns, and cities.

The film features a narration by German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Kaufman-style narrative-shifting and time-bending, where the action is spliced to flash forward to Orion crafting the story we're watching for his daughter, and back and forth from there. A time-traveling character with monster-tasing weaponry feels completely out of place, until it's revealed it's someone else's imagination who conjured up that scenario. It's all a neat narrative trick that, surprisingly, shouldn't lose young audiences along the way. As Orion's daughter Hypatia complains, adults love simple stories. This film might have some relatively straightforward messages, but it's not exactly a simple tale. And it's better for that.