Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr is a weekly Canadian podcast about young adult literature, their film and television adaptations, and everything in between. Now in its sixth season, the podcast—hosted by film critic Joe Lipsett and English professor Brenna Clarke-Gray— aims to highlight the cultural worth of young adult and middle-grade texts, with a focus on Canadian, Indigenous and minority creatives and stories.

Join us weekly for deep dives, as well as a round of YA BINGO.

Book 6, Chapter 22: Orion and the Dark

We’re skewing extremely young with our latest pick: Emma Yarlett’s 2014 picture book Orion and the Dark , and Sean Charmatz’s 2024 animated adaptation.

The book is fun and cute, perfect for young ones who have anxiety or fears. The film is from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman ( Being John Malkovich and Adaptation ) so it has A LOT going on, including new characters, a focus on generational storytelling, and time loops. It’s more of an exercise than an adaptation, which doesn’t always make it successful!

Read on for more about this week’s episode from co-host Joe Lipsett:

HKHS is no stranger to covering children’s content and animated films (we tackled Netflix’s Nimona just last year). Typically, though, we don’t skew this young. After all, how much can we possibly say about a picture book?

The answer, it turns out, is a reasonable amount! Obviously this episode is mostly about what Kaufman does to make a feature length animated film out of only 30 pages of pictures, but it’s a really interesting comparison. The film is definitely more of a Kaufman joint than an actual children’s film, which means the episode covers a picture book, an animated film for kids, and a cerebral (more adult) Kaufman film.

It’s kinda wild -JL

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