Orion and the Dark is a new Netflix animated movie for kids, with one thing that sets it apart from all of the other Netflix original animated family movies: It was written by Charlie Kaufman, aka the filmmaker behind artsy intellectual movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Kaufman adapted Orion and the Dark from the children’s book of the same name by Emma Yarlett, and added his cerebral, Kaufman-y flavor to the text—including a Werner Herzog cameo, in a joke that is directed straight at the Film Twitter crowd.
The story of Orion and The Dark centers on Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), an anxious 11-year-old boy who’s afraid of, well, everything. He catastrophizes every possible negative outcome in any situation, from giving the wrong the answer in class, to flushing the toilet and accidentally flooding the school. But nothing scares Orion more than the dark.
One night while lying in bed, terrified—and trying to convince himself not to run to his parents’ room—Orion meets the cartoon personification of his greatest fear, aka Dark. Voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, Dark is a cloaked figure who looks a bit like Death and resents Orion’s nightly fear of him. Dark insists that he’s a nice guy (or entity). Orion has nothing to fear! To prove it, Dark whips out a projector to show Orion a documentary that he made about himself. “It’s kind of a passion project,” Dark informs the kid. The projector flickers on, and the voice of Werner Herzog fills the room.
“Dark has existed for over five hundred million years since early life on Earth developed light-sensitive proteins,” Herzog says, over animated footage of the night sky. And that’s it! The movie’s credits roll, declaring that it was “Directed by Dark,” “Narrated by Werner Herzog,” with “Titles by Saul Bass.”
Herzog, of course, is a celebrated German director known for his dreamy cinema as much as his distinctive accent, which he has used to narrate dozens of his own documentaries, covering a range of subjects, from the Vietnam War to life in Antarctica. But he’s not exactly a household name for the young, target audience of Orion and the Dark. (Unless, maybe, those kids recognize him from The Mandalorian.)
In an interview for the Orion and the Dark production notes, director Sean Charmatz explained the Herzog cameo: “We had this scene where Dark made a short documentary about darkness. And we thought, ‘Who’s the coolest person to do the voiceover for that?’ There’s only about five people in the world who should read that part: Morgan Freeman, Sir David Attenborough… and Werner.”
Producer Peter McCown added in the same interview that he was amazed to get to work with both Charlie Kaufman and Werner Herzog on an animated family film. “We heard back that Werner would do it and we’re like, ‘What? Really?’ We literally had one line for him, so we’re like, ‘Oh god, we gotta write more stuff.’ We made him the narrator of the planetarium, too. I’m a film school guy. We study Werner, we study Charlie Kaufman, and so this was a few little feathers in my cap for my career, for sure.”
But perhaps even funnier than Herzog’s cameo is the shout-out to Oscar-winning graphic designer Saul Bass at the end of Dark’s documentary. For the uninitiated, Bass has designed title cards and posters for the likes of acclaimed directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. But you likely don’t know his name unless you’re a major film nerd.
It was a fun tip for Charmatz to his fellow adult film lovers, who may watch Orion and the Dark with their kids. “In the short film, we also give credit to Saul Bass, who is one of my favorite designers of all time,” Charmatz said. Bass, of course, died in 1996, so he didn’t actually design those title cards. It’s just a fun little Easter Egg. As Charmatz explained, “Giving credit to Saul and having Werner Herzog read those voiceovers was deeply a dream come true for me.”
