What’s Charlie Kaufman’s favourite Pixar film? We know the answer – Monsters, Inc. – because this egghead genius of a screenwriter said so once, while confessing that he hadn’t much cared for WALL.E. His feelings about Inside Out (2015) may be tinged with a trace more bitterness, since it competed with, and bested, his own thoroughly depressive stop-motion animation Anomalisa at that year’s Oscars – a comparison game, given their wildly different remits, that he found absurd.
“If you can’t beat them, join them” may be the axiom spurring Kaufman to collaborate with DreamWorks Animation and hereby write his first screenplay for a children’s film, adapting a 2014 picture book by Emma Yarlett called Orion and the Dark.
The tiny kid in Yarlett’s illustrations confronts his biggest fear in life: the moment when the bedroom lights go off and existential dread creeps in. In the film as well as the book, Orion gets to know the dark better, seeing him personified as a hulking, black companion-entity who’s ultimately more sad than scary, and has his best interests at heart.
The hand-holding odyssey that follows is strikingly Monsters, Inc.-y, and best – indeed, quite lovely – when it’s being that. Yarlett’s book was for pre-schoolers, but in Sean Charmatz’s film, Orion (Jacob Tremblay) is a shy boy in elementary school, at the age when he’s scribbling all day, illustrating his litany of fears, from mosquito bites to blocking the school’s plumbing and giving wrong answers in class.
Which is to say, he has been converted into a classic Charlie Kaufman character, an artist with an A to Z of neuroses he can’t hide, and years of therapy surely ahead. How it is that Dark (Paul Walter Hauser) presides as his single greatest fear is upsetting for the big furry-looking guy, who feels he’s done nothing to earn this. What’s so good about Light (Ike Barinholtz) anyway? He roars through the sky like a nude Olympian braggart, waking everyone up and endlessly sure of himself.