{"id":10041249,"date":"2025-04-24T05:12:20","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T09:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10041249"},"modified":"2025-04-29T13:15:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T17:15:23","slug":"the-legend-of-ochi-review-gorgeous-compelling-and-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/04\/24\/the-legend-of-ochi-review-gorgeous-compelling-and-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: Gorgeous, compelling, and weird"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor\u2019s Note<\/strong>: This review originally ran as part of our extensive coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and we\u2019re reposting it today due to the film\u2019s wider national release. Scan through\u00a0our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews<\/a>\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes a \u201cfamily\u201d film timeless? For a lot of folks, it means recapturing the aesthetics of the \u201880s \u2014 sure, films for kids existed a lot longer than that, but our cultural memory only extends so far back (it would have been a hell of a thing if Disney tried to preserve the tone of the original Shaggy Dog in its remake). Problem is, we\u2019re saturated in faux-Amblin features and shows, each plucking the same three chords, just in an occasionally different order. Modernity, at a certain point, means ceding the ground to Disney, playing on their turf or getting crushed by it. There are plenty of exceptions to this in animation, especially when coupled with overseas features (The Wild Robot<\/em>, Flow<\/em>, etc.), but as it goes, the kind of family fantasy film most people dream of is just that: A wish that they don\u2019t really care about coming true, because it\u2019ll just wind up on streaming someday anyhow. So, it\u2019s exciting that A24 is pushing their chips on to the table and putting out Isaiah Saxon\u2019s fantastic feature The Legend of Ochi<\/strong><\/em> later this spring*, because if this doesn\u2019t draw people in, then we\u2019re truly doomed to maudlin Pixar releases raising future generations.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes Saxon\u2019s feature stand out so strikingly in the modern kids\u2019 feature landscape isn\u2019t just that it\u2019s frequently *gorgeous* or that it has a compelling yet easy-to-parse story \u2014 it\u2019s that it\u2019s also fucking weird in the way that all of your favorite films were growing up. Folks often cite the dirty, lived-in feeling of the original Star Wars films as a reason why they\u2019re better than the prequels, and that is a truism for more than just that franchise. Be it The Neverending Story<\/em>, ET<\/em>, Flight of the Navigator<\/em>, or (God help you) The Goonies<\/em>, these were tactile in feel: One could reach out and touch them, with a little faith. Once CGI took over the toolbox, that multi-purpose hammer saw every life-giving element of practical effects work as a nail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saxon totally rejects this thesis \u2014 he\u2019s crafted imagery so gorgeous and unbelievable that morons are accusing him of it being AI, rather than the lovely blend of puppetry, practical effects and smartly used digital animation that\u2019s on display here. Yet its wonder isn\u2019t necessarily technically complex: Carpathea, his faux-Scandinavian setting is a strange habitat for these characters in an amusingly recognizable way. Shepherds and scythes co-exist with pastel-colored supermarkets and Citroens \u2014 a strange sort of timelessness (though you won\u2019t see a phone in site). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This small island in the black sea, seemingly plucked from one of Terry Gilliam\u2019s Time Bandits<\/em> location-scouts, is home to a group of bear-ape-orangutan-like creatures known as the Ochi, who the locals fear and hunt at night. Anything that goes wrong, they blame it on the Ochi, and then ask Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and his band of troops to make sure it never happens again. As far as a defense force goes, well, they\u2019re not what you\u2019d consider to be top-of-the-line: Aside from the aged and grieving soldier under the faux-Viking armor, they\u2019re just a bunch of teenage kids with bolt-action rifles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their number includes Maxim\u2019s daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who would much rather be doing anything else than trying to kill these creatures. Sure, she\u2019s scared of the creatures, but she\u2019s just as frightened of her father\u2019s bloodlust-zeal and his influence on the kids, and she really misses her mom, who left her father long ago for a new, solitary life somewhere in the island\u2019s mountain range. It\u2019s a disappointing and lonely life \u2014 her estrangement with her father and her unhelpful yet secretly kind adopted brother (Finn Wolfhard) means her world is mostly cold and spartan.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is until she goes out one night to check her father\u2019s traps and discovers a Baby Ochi caught in one (I will be calling him Baby Ochi, given that he doesn\u2019t have a given name and is heartbreakingly cute, much like Baby Yoda). His leg\u2019s been broken by the trap\u2019s metal teeth, and Yuri has a choice to make: Either she listens to her dad\u2019s fables and kills him with her grandfather\u2019s knife or she looks into those beautiful eyes and spares the baby. You know what choice she\u2019s going to make \u2014 it\u2019s a kid\u2019s movie, after all. So she frees him and takes the Baby Ochi home to nurse his wounds, and discovers that they\u2019re sensitive and incredibly intelligent creatures, who sing to each other in a musical language impossible for humans to understand. These revelations \u2014 and the danger she\u2019s put herself in by having the critter in her house \u2014 cause her to do something drastic: A journey on foot to take the Baby Ochi back to his kinfolk, wherever they may reside. Her dad, of course, will follow her to the ends of the earth, and she may even find her mom waiting for her, somewhere, when she needs her the most. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an element of melancholy to Ochi that feels on point \u2014 I keep going back to Gilliam because it reminds me so much of Time Bandits<\/em>, in terms of its mixture of tenderheart sadness and adventure-humor. Yet it\u2019s a kind movie that doesn\u2019t forget that children are children: Capable of putting up with the scary and the silly, suspending their disbelief all the way to the conclusion. It\u2019s also fabulously gross a la the Peanut Butter Solution (Ochis have strange poisonous bites that cause arms to go Veruca Salt) and wonderfully well-intentioned, though it\u2019s never preachy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of the eco-friendly bonafides that A24 stresses in the marketing, it\u2019s not fucking Ferngully<\/em>, and Saxon refuses to break the construct of the lovely reality that he\u2019s creates to tell you to recycle. It lets the kids learn these lessons through the power of cinematic storytelling. That\u2019s what makes this so much better than its kindred in the retro-cinema vibe: It is pulling from a similar aesthetic bag of tricks, yet it doesn\u2019t cite them in an obvious way. Saxon wants you in his timeless world, with the cutest little critter imaginable, getting moved to tears by the gentle, beautiful ending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Ochi was originally a February release, but it had to be moved due to Saxon\u2019s home tragically burning down in the LA fires \u2014 we wish him the best, as well, in this awful time<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This review originally ran as part of our extensive coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and we\u2019re reposting it today due to the film\u2019s wider national release. Scan through\u00a0our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions. What makes a \u201cfamily\u201d film timeless? For a lot of folks, it means recapturing the aesthetics of the \u201880s \u2014 sure, films for kids existed a lot longer than that, but our cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10040572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[26409,21272,35309,11434,35326],"class_list":["post-10041249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-header","tag-sundance","tag-sundance-2025","tag-sundance-film-festival","tag-the-legend-of-ochi"],"yoast_head":"\n'The Legend of Ochi' Review: Gorgeous, compelling, and weird<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Isaiah Saxon\u2019s fantastic feature is a throwback 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