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Timothy Lee takes a thoughtful look at Orion and the Dark, along with the rest of Charlie's oeuvre, and examines the recurring theme of mental illness.

Since Being John Malkovich’s release, Kaufman has continued to baffle and impress viewers, as every movie he writes or directs is different from the last: Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Synecdoche, New York; Anomalisa, and his 2020 Netflix nightmare scenario I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Fans and critics have tried to pin down Kaufman’s movies using terms like “surreal” or “meta,” but focusing on the structure rather than the content of his work is the wrong approach. It’s more revealing to consider the shared theme that ties all Kaufman’s films together, including his latest, the animated Netflix kids’ movie Orion and the Dark.

Charlie Kaufman’s protagonists have one crucial commonality: their shared mental health struggles. Depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, low self-esteem, and other mental health issues have been key components in all of Kaufman’s movies, explored through protagonists who each have different ways of coping. Whether it’s the driving conflict (in Anomalisa or I’m Thinking of Ending Things) or just a byproduct of the journeys they undergo (in Being John Malkovich or Adaptation), it’s a consistent, prominently featured theme in Kaufman’s work. Having mental health issues is an inescapable fate for a Kaufman protagonist, and at some point, they will inevitably be forced to confront these issues whether they like it or not, often with little success.

[...]

Kaufman himself has said, “There aren’t a lot of happy endings in my movies. I think maybe there aren’t a lot of happy endings in life.” And yet he grants two notable exceptions, for a fictionalized version of himself and a child protagonist.

Perhaps Kaufman sees a bit of himself in Orion and wants to give him the same sense of hope he gave his fictional counterpart from Adaptation. (Source)

I love articles like this--something a bit different from the standard review or interview. (Though I wish we had a couple of CK interviews re: Orion.)

Longtime BCK pal David Rosen checks out Orion and the Dark in the latest episode of his podcast, Piecing It Together. ("A podcast where we take a look at a new movie and try to figure out what other movies may have inspired it.")

It's a good listen! They've also covered Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm Thinking of Ending Things and Antkind (granted, not a movie, but a book about a movie, written by a moviemaker).

There's a fun Reddit comment summarising some of the stuff that was in the first draft of Charlie's Orion and the Dark. Scroll past if you don't want spoilers, but you might want what comes after the screenshot:

If you're interested, the first draft can be downloaded here. The script is dated December 12, 2016 and clocks in at 122 pages.

Orion and the Dark is doing impressively in its first week, Netflix's #2 English language movie and #3 worldwide. 10 million views so far!

At this rate it could end up Charlie's most popular film since 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

via BGR and Netflix.

In an Instagram post six weeks ago, Genndy Tartakovsky says he was in the running to helm the Orion and the Dark film adaptation. Tartakovsky is the creator of Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars: Clone Wars, among others.

Since Netflix released a trailer I thought I would share. I don’t think I’ll get in trouble for this…so here goes.
Around 2015 I was asked to develop a movie based on this children’s book called Orion and the Dark. So I came up with a version where the kid has to travel to the Dark World to get rid of his fears of the dark. In that world everything that he fears in the real world is explained and actually nice. I was pretty excited about it but then it went the normal path of Studio development...fear, confusion, doubt, etc. So I moved on and now they made it. So here are my original sketches. (Source)

via DreamWorks Wiki

Let's get this out of the way: in almost all areas of everything, I know very little. Often you should not listen to me.

Okay.

So we know Orion and the Dark has one credited screenwriter (Charlie Kaufman--maybe you've heard of him), Additional Screenplay Material by Lloyd Taylor and Brandon Sawyer, and 22 Story Artists.

Wiki will tell you that a Story Artist is "a credit given to additional screenwriters on animated films who do not share in the screenplay or story credit, as can be seen on Pixar and Disney animated films."

So if you're like me, you may think to yourself "Somehow 24 people, plus Charlie, had a hand in the shooting draft of Orion."

However! Andrea on our FB page pointed out a Pixar job listing for a Story Artist, and it paints a more detailed picture of what goes down.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Receive written and verbal descriptions of a sequence from the director or head of story
• Create quick thumbnail sketches through to finished detailed storyboard panels
• Perform background research to inform the story process
• Illustrate script pages and come up with story ideas
• Pitch storyboards to the director and other members of the team 
• Work with director and head of story to define staging, pacing and camera action
• Come up with inventive ideas with a sense of entertainment and humor
• Develop character personality and dramatic/comedic action
• Draw storyboards for scenes assigned
• Refine dialogue where needed
• Revise, edit and modify sketches as needed, per director's notes  (Source)

This makes loads more sense.

I'm still curious as to how we went from Charlie's first draft to the shooting draft, because there are big differences. It's interesting to me. I don't think I've seen CK make changes on that scale before.

Thanks Andrea!

In an interview with Skwigly, an online animation magazine, Orion and the Dark director Sean Charmatz says Charlie wrote three drafts of the film, and they used the third.

How did Kaufman’s script find its way to DreamWorks?

I think DreamWorks is aware of the whimsy and the inventiveness and the charm and depth of Charlie’s writing and they were like, “let’s try and make an animated movie with all that stuff in there,” and I commend them for that. He wrote three drafts and we loved the third draft which came to me a few years after he had written it. I put together this animatic, where I was the voice of Dark and my son was Orion and I made this four minute piece based on Charlie’s script. I showed the studio and they loved it. (Source)

Charmatz also talks about a few of the changes that were made.

There were things we had to cut out. There was a whole page where Charlie listed the titles of films with Dark in it, because Dark was talking about how he’s hated. Charlie took the entire script page to name films. Obviously, in the movie, we can’t spend 10 minutes listing titles of movies. No one’s going to sit through that but it’s still really fun to read it.

That could’ve been pretty fun.

It would have been 10 minutes of listing, just a static shot. As an artist, I love that, I love how pushed that is. It’s really inspiring to me. I love that statement.

And of course, being an animation magazine, he talks about the visual aspects of the film as well.

I'll be posting Charlie's first draft in a day or two, but if anyone has a copy of later drafts by him, I'd love to take a look. I wish I could see what the third draft looked like, before the 24 other credited writers and story artists did whatever they did. Maybe they suggested ideas and wrote material that didn't make it into the film, and the businessy contractual side of things meant that they got a credit anyway? And it turns out the film really is 90% Charlie? WHO KNOWS.

Thanks to the ever dependable u/pavingmomentum for the article!

David Ehrlich with an astute review of Orion and the Dark:

On the one hand, this is the first time since “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” that Kaufman has been credited for writing a film that he didn’t direct himself. On the other hand, it’s hard to put much faith in credits on a streaming platform that doesn’t even let you watch them, and — beloved as Yarlett’s book might be — this project seemed like precisely the kind of content slop whose producers would regard Kaufman’s imprint as less of a feature than a bug.

[...] We can’t know to what (if any) extent Kaufman’s final draft was diluted by the Kafka-esque process of bringing studio animation from script to screen, but it’s safe to say that his signature touch hasn’t been lost in translation. And that touch extends far beyond the stuff of basic character details and unusually sharp versions of the in-jokes that movies like this often lob at the parents who are watching along with their children. “Orion and the Dark” takes the clever wisp of a bedtime story provided by its source material and stretches it into a self-aware and sweetly multi-generational meditation on how beautiful the world can be if you learn to live with your fears.

Kaufman may not have been granted quite the same latitude that Netflix gave him with “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” as this is still pretty straightforward American kids fare at the end of the day (complete with edgeless character designs and the kind of manic pacing that leaves you a little exhausted by the start of the third act). But then again, it’s possible he didn’t feel compelled to ask for it.

If “Orion and the Dark” is in some respects a major outlier in Kaufman’s body of work, there’s still no getting around the fact that he was just the right fit for the job [...] (Source)

Turns out there's at least one other CK draft of the Orion screenplay, according to Orion and the Dark producer Peter McCown.

Charlie Kaufman wrote the script and I’m such a huge fan of his. How did working with that as the base come about, and how was it working on something that fans might not expect from him?

Peter McCown: Yeah, I mean, Sean and I are huge fans of Charlie’s work. We talked about it all the time. I studied Charlie’s scripts when I went to film school, so he got this wonderful book from Emma Yarlett, this Orion and the Dark high concept, and I think he really sank his teeth into it. This was years ago. He produced a couple of drafts of the script, which he just expanded that world.

I think he’s so strong in the kids’ space, and I really hope he continues a little bit more in the kids’ space because of his whimsy and his creativity and the expansion he can do to really anything with introducing these new ideas, but then tying them up so brilliantly. I think he’s perfect for this, and he brings a little bit of an edge to it that you want. It’s not your stock animated fare anymore. I think he brings it to a different level, but also, most importantly, with the main character, he’s able to explore main characters in this and in his other works that are extremely real and extremely complex. I think you don’t always get that in animation. My hope and my dream is that he continues in the kids’ space for sure — at least in the family space. (Source)

That's via ComingSoon.net. "Working with that as the base" seems telling. I'd be interested to see how different the second draft was to the first, considering how far the movie wanders from the first draft. Here's the accompanying video:

Then there's this, via MovieWeb:

MovieWeb: Orion and the Dark is an amazing film. I really enjoyed it. Charlie Kaufman's script teaches children how to face existential crises. Talk about getting him to adapt Emma Yarlett's book. What was he like to work with?

Sean Charmatz: He wrote the script. And we kind of took it from there. We loved the script. We were excited about the themes and what the movie was going to be about. I was all for it. I'm so happy that we got to make this film because it's a film that is brave. It is unique, tonally, it is a little edgy and scary, and deals with things that are not always topics people want to talk about. But I think we did it in a really whimsical way. I think that the film could help people to actually deal with their anxieties. (Source)

There's a video with that one, too.

To me (though I could be wrong!) "we kind of took it from there" implies that, yes, CK's script was essentially a starting point only. Also interesting that Charlie isn't doing any media for this one, when he's done it for every other project--he never even mentioned Orion when promoting Antkind and Ending Things, though The Memory Police, IQ83 and others were happily chatted about.

Not suggesting anything sinister! Only that Charlie isn't as attached to this film as it's been sometimes implied.

There's a new interview with Lily Gladstone at The New Yorker, and right at the end she talks briefly about The Memory Police and what drew her to Charlie's screenplay:

You’ve just had a new project announced: “The Memory Police,” directed by Reed Morano and written by Charlie Kaufman, based on the sci-fi novel by Yoko Ogawa. What drew you to this project?

Since I’ve developed my own taste in film, Charlie Kaufman has been my favorite screenwriter. “Adaptation” was the first acting master class that I put myself through. I’ve seen that film, oh, more than twenty times. A lot of people who love the novel are very curious what the adaptation is going to be, and it’s remarkable, I can tell you. It’s the kind of space I really love playing in. There was a substantial period of my life when I was working with friends and creating theatre pieces that delved into themes of subconscious and memory, all of the things that are present in this incredible book. It’s [set on] a nondescript island in a nondescript world, with the device that people’s memories are being hijacked and erased by an authoritarian, fascist government run by what’s called the Memory Police. And within it there are themes that are going to be recognized worldwide. I’ve spent so much of our time talking about language revitalization. There was this systemic effort to erase the collective memory of our very language. Yoko Ogawa wrote a book that speaks globally to people who have suffered under the foot of authoritarianism, and it’s told in a sci-fi world that’s going to be accessible. When we got sent it, it was, like, Yep, this is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. (Source)

Early days, but this sounds like something Charlie would knock out of the park.