Donnie Darko Meets Inside Out In Netflix's 93-Minute Fantasy Masterpiece

Published Aug 15, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel. If Donnie Darko and Inside Out were mashed together, you might get something that looks a little like this 93-minute animated fantasy comedy on Netflix. Netflix has grown a strong stable of animated kids' films over the years, and it has had some standouts with Klaus, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and Utraman: Rising. There's still no animated production on the platform that can rise to the heights of Pixar films, though there are a few animation studios that can claim to. DreamWorks Animation has occasionally put out a Pixar-quality movie from time to time, and in 2024, for the first time, they made a film for Netflix. Orion and the Dark is an underseen fantasy adventure based on the 2014 children's book by Emma Yarlett and written by Charlie Kaufman. The same Charlie Kaufman who's known for mind-bending movies like Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Kaufman brings his meta-storytelling to the animated world in Orion and the Dark with a story that includes time travel, stories inside of stories, and abstract ideas personified as glittery, colorful guides. Despite its influences, Orion and the Dark is a wholly unique film. The film follows Orion, an anxious 11-year-old with a deep-seated fear of many things, but none so much as the dark. Frustrated by his irrational fear and tired of the unfair complaints, the physical embodiment of the dark (named "Dark" and voiced by Paul Walter Hauser) spirits him away to a nighttime world to show him that the things that go bump in the night aren't so scary after all. Orion And The Dark Is Like If Pixar Made A Hard Time-Travel Movie The basic structure of Orion and the Dark does fit the mold of that reductive internet meme of Pixar movies, that they're all about the conceit, "What if 'X' had feelings?" "What if toys had feelings?" for Toy Story. "What if rats had feelings?" for Ratatouille. "What if feelings had feelings?" for Inside Out, and so on. However, Orion and the Dark is more than "What if the abstract nature of night had feelings?" The film is a fascinatingly constructed time-travel movie that utilizes both grandfather paradoxes, storytelling cheats, and kids' movie rules. It's revealed early in the movie that an adult Orion is actually telling this story to his daughter, Hypatia. However, halfway through the film, Orion's story ends on a sour note. Unsatisfied, Hypatia goes back in time (or back into the story? It's unclear) and changes things. Hypatia's story is solved by another metatextual rescue; her son, to whom she's telling this story, travels back in time to retrieve her. There are layers to Orion and the Dark that even parents watching along may get confused by. Orion And The Dark Is Way Too Underrated DreamWorks Orion and the Dark came and went with little fanfare, save for a strong 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the film deserved more audience acclaim. The movie grapples not just with mature ideas and themes, but with mature storytelling. Plenty of kids' movies present adult ideas in comprehensible packages, but almost none present them in this mode. There really aren't too many films like Orion and the Dark. Its combination of child-friendly adventure and advanced story structure is a result of bringing someone like Kaufman in. It's a movie that will surprise and gratify parents as much as it will children. Release Date February 2, 2024 Runtime 92 Minutes Director Sean Charmatz Writers Charlie Kaufman, Lloyd Taylor, Emma Yarlett