[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE LEGEND OF OCHI IS A HANDCRAFTED KIDS’ MANIFESTO  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
May 2, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The Legend of Ochi, a new A24 family film, combines live action,
CGI, and old-fashioned puppetry to charming effect. _

Helena Zengel stars as Yuri in The Legend of Ochi. , (Sundance
Institute / A24)

 

There’s a small A24 family film out called _The Legend of Ochi_,
based on an original script by the writer-director Isaiah Saxon, who
cocreated the children’s educational site DIY.org and founded
Encyclopedia Pictura, an art collective making short films and music
videos for performers like Björk. _Legend_ is Saxon’s feature
film debut, and it isn’t getting much attention yet from potential
viewers flooding the multiplex to see _Sinners_
[[link removed]] and
maybe _A Minecraft Movie_
[[link removed]] for the
second or third time.

_The Legend of Ochi _is a better, spikier film than I expected, given
the marketing campaign, which makes it look like a twee kids’
fantasy with a terrible case of the cutes.

In a way, it’s not the marketers’ fault, because it’s hard to
avoid striking twee notes when describing the film. It’s a
live-action-plus-puppets-and-animatronics-and-CGI fantasy-adventure
film about a lonely preteen girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) raised to
fear the elusive forest creatures called ochi. She defies her family
and community when she finds an injured baby ochi and embarks on an
adventure to reunite the creature with its family.

Given that, how could it be anything but a glutinous mass of
sentimentality with a vaguely environmentalist message?

The eccentric setting of the film helps, as do the darkly comic
characters. Shot in Romania, the film depicts a remote, rugged, muddy,
and entirely fictional village in the Carpathian Mountains. The
inhabitants live in a community that combines the ancient and the
modern, with crude, boxy cars driven past sword-bearing locals on
horseback. Yuri’s father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), is a lonely and
fanatical ochi tracker spouting old-world religious platitudes and
strutting around in fake neo-Roman armor, training up a ragtag band of
local boys to hunt the ochi with rusty muskets plus more tech-savvy
radar gizmos.

Maxim is obsessed by the loss of his wife, Dasha (Emily Watson), whom
he claims was “taken” by the ochi, though we’ll soon find out
the ochi are being scapegoated for every problem in the village and
that Dasha’s disappearance is just another example. She’s
eventually discovered by Yuri living in a remote mountainside shack,
where she tends sheep and lives a hardy life alone, getting by very
well despite the handicap of having one wooden hand.

That hand reminds us of the wooden finger on the hand of another
frustrated woman: Margot, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in _The Royal
Tenenbaums_. It’s a reference to the cinema of Wes Anderson, which
is clearly an influence on the ironic and impassive tone of _The
Legend of Ochi_ overall, along with the expressionless, distrait,
Andersonian line delivery of many of the actors.

Yuri’s teenage older brother, Petro (Finn Wolfhard), is entirely
under his father’s sway in pseudo-military training, and he’s
“only nice when no one else is around,” according to Yuri. Yuri,
played with an excellent deadpan delivery by Zengel, listens to metal
music and regards the guyish regime around her with a jaundiced eye.
She tags along after her father and the boys on a nighttime ochi hunt,
but it’s a ridiculously destructive process that includes trying to
trap a sleeping herd of ochis that are no threat to anyone, shooting
wildly in all directions, and setting a forest fire.

When Yuri finds a surviving but injured baby ochi and runs off with
it, she leaves her father a farewell note, giving as one of her
reasons for striking out on her own “I’m cooler than you.” This
is so manifestly true that the entire film becomes a mini manifesto in
favor of children’s empowerment. As Saxon puts it
[[link removed]],

I hope that this inspires a sense that should trust their intuition,
gut, and nose. Don’t listen to your parents; go do what you want to
do. They’ll figure it out and have to get on board eventually.
Don’t let anyone put you in the corner. Go forth.

The ochi, blue-skinned creatures with russet-gold fur and big eyes and
ears, were based on real animals, including the Chinese golden
snub-nosed monkey, in the hopes, Saxon says, of making the ochi seem
like “a real, undiscovered primate.”

[[link removed]]

A baby ochi, from The Legend of Ochi. (A24)

They were built as puppets with animatronic faces by leading film
industry puppeteer Robert Tygner (who worked on _Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles_, _The Witches_, and _Labyrinth_) in order to give them
weight and mass in the film, a welcome change from the endless
cut-rate CGI that’s usually forced on us in the cineplex. The
combination of old and new techniques pays tribute to 1980s-era
fantasy films like _E. T._, _Labyrinth_, and _The Dark Crystal_,
while updating them with a limited use of computer imaging. As
Saxon explains
[[link removed]],

We’re shooting on location with matte paintings, with a puppet, with
suit performers, mixing it with real actors. Hopefully the brain can
just surrender and say, “I don’t know how they’re doing this.
This is magical.”

_The Legend of Ochi_ is paced a bit ploddingly and without many
surprises — from early on, you can guess how the narrative is going
to unspool. But the details of its Carpathian neverland are
delightfully different from what we’re used to seeing, and the
actors all give excellent performances, with Dafoe and Watson
especially good at conveying tough old-world earthiness.

The film is manifestly the creation of many loving hands, and Saxon is
committed to a handcrafted aesthetic even if he’s happy to include a
bit of discreet CGI in the mix. As AI-over-everything is being
advocated in the film industry as well as everywhere else, Saxon
is standing for
[[link removed]] the
alternative:

I’m sure that AI is gonna be approached [as a means of creating film
effects] for new generations of kids, but my skepticism about it is
this: Just how much is it really taking of you to make it? A lot of
what we’ve seen in AI so far is people who’d rather have done the
work and be at the end of the process than people who want to do the
work. But the doing is where everything is. It’s not in having done.

By “everything,” Saxon seems to mean creative passion invested in
the arts that can achieve expressive effects that move us. It’s
strange that such a stance would have to be argued for, as if it were
a daring or at least very offbeat position. But here we are.

Share this article

Facebook  Twitter  Email

Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

* Subscribe [[link removed]]
* Donate [[link removed]]

To celebrate International Workers’ Day, we’re offering
subscriptions starting at $1. Follow this link
[[link removed]].

* The Legend of Ochi
[[link removed]]
* A24
[[link removed]]
* child empowerment
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]