Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Beauty of the Beast: Review of The Legend of Ochi
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
As a child in the sixties, I cut my teeth on family films like Old Yeller, Babes in Toyland, 101 Dalmatians, and The Parent Trap, a cinematic universe dominated by Walt Disney, whose influence spread from the big screen into our living rooms with his television show The Wonderful World of Disney. Cute animals, goofy sidekicks, wholesomeness, and unabashed sentimentality were trademarks of the Disney label. And he was pretty much the only game in town.
There were outliers, of course, like Hanna Barbera cartoons, and Bob Clampett’s Beanie and Cecil, but Disney versions of children’s stories and fairy tales became the cultural constant for the boomer generation. We all knew Bambi, Mary Poppins, The Love Bug, Snow White, Cinderella, and, of course, Mickey Mouse, all as uncomplicated and pure as the driven snow.
Later in the seventies and into the eighties, when the quality of Disney productions waned and grew less popular, a greater variety of children’s movies emerged. From manic adventures like The Goonies, or Hook to sci-fi and fantasy adventures like E.T., The Dark Crystal, and The Never-ending Story brought some different and more complicated sensibilities to family movies.
Of course, even while sensibilities shifted, plots and themes of family films remained mostly the same. The quest story (The Goonies or Up), the hero story (Wall-E or How to Train Your Dragon), or the facing your fears story (Dragonslayer), and dozens of variations of these and other tropes remained a constant.
Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi is a new film that harkens back to the family films of the eighties, paying tribute to some of the great movies of that era while still managing to put a beautifully rendered modern sensibility to its story.
In a remote village on the fictional Black Sea Island of Carpathia, a young girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) accompanies her father Maxim (Willem Defoe), her adopted brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard) and various other village boys on a nighttime hunt for the Ochi, a primate-like creature Maxim maintains are destroying their livestock and ruining their lives. In the chilling and breathtaking sequence, the hunters attack the creatures but kill none.
The next morning, Maxim berates his army of teen and prepubescent warriors for not killing any Ochi. He talks about Yuri’s mother Dasha (Emily Watson) and how she left them. Upset, Yuri leaves the table to check the family traps. She finds a wounded infant Ochi in one of them and decides to take it home where she discovers it does not seem to be the evil creature Maxim believes it to be.
Yuri decides to take it back to its family and sets out on her long journey. Petro sees her leaving but says nothing to Maxim, but when he finds Ochi fur in Yuri’s room, Maxim gathers his squad to go after his daughter, who he believes has been kidnapped by the Ochi.
In a scene reminiscent of the frenetic action of Hook or The Goonies, Yuri takes the young creature into a grocery store where it is recognized and, when frightened, bites Yuri on the arm. After a wild chase, the two escape. Yuri’s bite wound festers, but she suddenly discovers she can communicate with the young Ochi. They make their way to a farm that turns out to belong to Dasha, Yuri’s mother, who has studied the Ochi and collected data on their habits, language, and culture. She cures Yuri’s bite wound and sends her off to bring the Ochi home.
Maxim arrives at Dasha’s farm, demanding to see Yuri. The two argue and the boys destroy her trove of information. They follow Yuri to the hidden lair of the Ochi where the final resolution between the family members and the different cultures is reached.
There is nothing new to this story. Yuri’s quest to restore the lost Ochi to its mother is a variation of the Finding Nemo story. Yuri, as an angry and disaffected teenager, is the most current in a long line of these types of heroines (see Elsa in Frozen or Ariel in The Little Mermaid). Maxim, especially when he dresses in archaic armor on his mission to rescue Yuri, embodies the archetype of the bumbling and inept father figure out of step with the times, like Maurice in Beauty and the Beast or Sir Pellinore in The Sword in the Stone.
Dasha embodies the stereotype of the witch, a woman who has unlocked the secrets of nature. She is most often seen as dangerous and conniving—and Dasha is certainly perceived that way by Maxim and his crew—but she is far wiser and more pragmatic than her ex-husband (whose solution was to cut off her hand after an Ochi bite). Her understanding of the Ochi people has led to her isolation from society, particularly Maxim’s determination to demonize the otherness of the Ochi.
For all its reliance of all the familiar tropes, and its rather messy plotting later in the movie, The Legend of Ochitranscends its own story. Isaiah Saxon’s rendition of this fable is beautifully rendered. The colors leap off the screen and the high-altitude and panoramic shots of the landscape are breathtaking. The rhythm of the film, paired with the lush visuals, is almost poetic, as if Saxon’s mission is to help the viewer bond with the land and the environment.
It is a dreamscape that is simultaneously frightening and beautiful. The initial hunting sequence is as terrifying as a nightmare, but the beauty of the landscapes speak to mysterious but wondrous places in the imagination. Yuri’s trip down the river to the foggy lair of the Ochi is starkly beautiful yet supremely harrowing.
Possibly because the film is set on an island in the Black Sea, the predominance of the blue and yellow palettes in the film are a possible reference to the current conflict in the Ukraine. The Ochi’s faces are blue and yellow; Yuri wears a bright yellow jacket, her pet caterpillars are blue and yellow, and the landscape is imbued with those hues. Considering the care with which the cinematography of this film was rendered, it seems unlikely that this was not intentional.
Saxon has maintained that—perhaps as an homage to those family films of the seventies—that no AI was used in the production of The Legend of Ochi and that the puppets were completely hand-operated. If so, Ochi brings an old sensibility to a new—but well-used—production.
It shows that the recent tsunami of the Marvel universe superhero movies with their (now-cliched) epic fight scenes and CGI reality are not necessary to make good cinema. The glitz and the never-ceasing bombardment of video game imagery is getting old. Attendance has been wavering for the Marvel-type product for some time now. Disney is up to its old tricks with some sorts of new twists (the love interest in Frozen), but The Legend of Ochi has, with Saxon’s unique and singular vision—given us a fresh look at some stories.
The Legend of Ochi is not only a beautifully crafted film; it is a tribute to a brand of filmmaking rarely seen in family movies anymore and only proves that good cinema does not have to contain eye-popping special effects—only heart.