Netflix’s Orion and the Dark brought back techniques that animators no longer use
Like many animated films in recent years, Netflix and DreamWorks’ Orion and the dark steps outside the design conventions that had come to define American CG films. The stylistic revolution has truly taken off as animators battle against the slick perfection built into previous computer animation algorithms. And their desire for more creatively stylized animations has been reinforced by the enormous success of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
“I think people are just looking for something new,” says Sean Charmatz, president of Orion and the dark. “We all saw the CG film, and it’s clean and beautiful. It’s shiny. (But) you will see (movies) of it Spider-Verse Unpleasant Mitchells Unpleasant Turtles Recently, I’ve been doing these really inventive things. As long as (the style you choose) fits what you’re trying to do and the story you’re trying to tell, I think you’ll get some really, really cool moments. I don’t think any of us want to (change our animation style) just to do it, just to come up with something cool. It has to fit.”
For Orion and the dark, the inspiration was clear. The film, written by Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind And being John Malkovich writer Charlie Kaufman follows a very anxious young boy who meets the personification of darkness and begins to overcome his fears. The story comes true Emma Yarlett’s picture book with the same name. Charmatz and producer Peter McCown were keen to capture the charm of Yarlett’s original illustrations and get the feeling of pencil on paper. Although most of the film is rendered in CG, the film still has a distinctly textured and stylized look: a “kind of handmade,” as Charmatz puts it.
The tribute to the original drawings goes beyond that, with scenes from Orion’s sketchbook coming to life and playing out as Orion gets lost in his own head and the pages turn, illustrating his worst fears in childlike drawings. The pencil-on-paper roots of animation are most evident in those sequences, and the drawings enhance the story from Orion’s perspective. After all, he is the narrator of the story, an anxious little boy who processes his fears through his drawings. It was important for the filmmakers to make those doodles come to life. But when they approached the 2D animation they wanted for those scenes, they faced a unique challenge.
“Almost everything is CG-based now,” Charmatz explains. “When you ask someone to do 2D, it almost feels like: What?”
“You have to bring in some of the older generation,” McCown adds.
“(It was like) people went into their garage and pulled out a box to do the job because they hadn’t touched that stuff (in years),” Charmatz says. “But honestly, it wasn’t at a big challenge, because we had that Emily Tetri designing the drawings, and she was so good at making the drawings feel authentic, as if a child was drawing them.”
The style in the sketchbook series is done in “cooking line animation”, with the individual lines of the drawing meandering, suggesting just a hint of nervous instability or vulnerability. This is achieved by repeatedly tracing an original drawing and then combining them into separate frames. Charmatz says the actual process was quite simple, once everyone had metaphorically dusted off those old skills. These doodle scenes were also special because they brought Tetri’s drawings directly onto the screen, which is not the case with most animated films.
“You never see one-on-one drawings — the drawing that the artist made, and that’s what’s on the screen,” says Charmatz. “But there are about ten minutes of Emily’s one-on-one drawings in the film. And I think that’s really cool.”
Orion and the dark releases on Netflix on February 2.