January 30, 2025 5:52 PM
Orion and the Dark
Last year while I was visiting my family and we were flipping through different movies on Netflix, my six year old niece chimed in and said "I like this movie!" It was Orion and the Dark, and the rest of us had never seen it before so we decided to watch it.
The movie started off really strong, with Orion talking about his anxiety and his fears in a really creative way. He illustrates his fears in a journal and the movie does a great job animating his drawings. His biggest fear is the dark, and Orion meets a character that represents the dark itself.
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Dark is actually a pretty cool character. The movie gives him a real personality, and he just wants to be understood. Later we also meet the "night entities", which kind of felt like Inside Out-lite to me. It turns into your typical adventure of overcoming fear and gaining a new friendship, but then at the end the movie gets kind of zany and there's a flying turtle and even time travel?!
We paused the movie at one point and saw that it was written by Charlie Kaufman, and we were like "of course".
Overall, I liked the movie. I thought that it spent way too much time on the night entities (I'm also not really a fan of Inside Out), and I got a little bored in the middle, but I thought the wackiness at the end was great.
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After I watched the movie, I googled it, and I stumbled upon a copy of Kaufman's first draft of the script. I was curious how this compared to the final movie, so I read the whole thing.
I definitely laughed a lot more while reading this than when I watched the movie. Here, Orion is a huge movie buff and there are a lot of movie references. (I can totally see why that was mostly cut out of the final script though)
The night entities have a completely different vibe too. They're kind of weird, and they're a lot more interesting than how the movie portrays them. It felt like Kaufman's original vision for the entities was lost in the final script, which is a little disappointing.
The endings were also very different, but in this case, I actually prefer the way the movie ended. They are both a little zany, but the movie really honed in on Orion and Dark's friendship, while the original script was much more focused just on Orion at the end.
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But this wasn't an original story by Kaufman. His script is actually based on a picture book with the same name. And I love picture books, so I had to read it.
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And it is such a well crafted picture book. There really isn't much to the story itself (no night entities, just the dark!) But the book absolutely shines with its illustrations and the way that the words are laid out. There is so much detail, and I made sure to pause and really look at all the parts of each page.
I also really like the way that color is used. Sometimes I just like looking at the pages with different shades of the night sky.
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While the movie is enjoyable enough, if I'm going to recommend anything in this post, I'd say that you should read the book. I think it would make a great bedtime story.
January 16, 2022 12:23 AM
If anything happens I love you
During the holidays I watched several mostly terrible movies (that I considered adding links for in this blog post, but I don't think that's worth it). For the most part, my mom picked out the movies, but as we were endlessly scrolling through Netflix, one title caught my eye.
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If Anything Happens I Love You is an animated short that follows two grieving parents. I was initially drawn in by the art style, and I appreciate the use of music and (lack of) dialogue. I was reading the Wikipedia page for this film and it included a quote from one of the writers:
From the very beginning it was always going to be an animated film. We just thought a live-action version of this would be way too intense. We thought animation was the perfect gateway to have these deep conversations about loss and grief.
I'm positive there is no way I would have picked to watch this movie if it weren't for the art, so I'm glad they went with this approach, and I'm glad I watched it.