The Legend Of Ochi

Contrary to internet speculation, AI is not responsible for the saucer-eyed, blue-furred, adorably simian attractions of The Legend Of Ochi. No, these are creatures of an older age — that is, the practical-effects heyday of the 1980s, when people still built monsters from elbow grease instead of ones and zeroes. Moving to movies years after conjuring the weird menagerie of Björk’s ‘Wanderlust’ video, director Isaiah Saxon deploys old-school animatronics and puppetry to breathe life into his beasts of the Romanian wild, which roam the woods surrounding a sleepy island village on the Black Sea. The Ochi are charmingly bespoke — and so, on a purely cosmetic level, is everything else in this quirky and vibrantly shot A24 family film. Hey, sometimes they do (hand)make ’em like they used to!

If only Saxon crafted his storybook story as carefully. It feels cobbled together in a less inventive way, like a rummage sale of spare parts from Amblin, Ghibli and Cartoon Saloon. And if one live-action How To Train Your Dragon this year wasn’t enough, here’s another gloss on its unlikely interspecies communion: like forward-thinking Hiccup, young Yuri (News Of The World’s Helena Zengel) discovers that the dangerous critters she’s been raised to fear aren’t so dangerous, after all. Of course, dragons are big and scaly and fire-breathing. What’s the excuse for confusing the cuddly Ochi for killers? Naturally, our fair-haired hero falls fast for the lost, injured youngling she finds: a living plush doll with a Mogwai trill and peepers that make Baby Yoda look homely by comparison.

Such manmade wonders deserved less familiar storytelling.

Maybe it takes a miracle worker of Spielberg’s calibre to forge chemistry between a child actor and a special effect, even one this admirably artisanal. Try though the puppeteers do, The Legend Of Ochi never quite sells the girl-and-her-monkey kinship, even as it stresses the ways that Yuri feels lost, too, as the daughter of a chieftain (Willem Dafoe) more invested in militarising the island’s unruly boys than tending to the needs of his own lonely kid.

For all the emotional constipation of his character, Dafoe lends the material a certain tenderness to go with its deadpan whimsy. He also gets one howling scene of Lighthouse-lite ranting — a volatile reunion with the girl’s estranged mother, played by an equally grubby and severe Emily Watson. These veteran performers’ wearied features are their own kind of special effect, as invaluable as the lush matte-painting scenery and woolly wildlife worthy of Jim Henson. Such manmade wonders deserved less familiar storytelling; much more so than the verdant imagery, it’s Saxon’s thin, hodgepodge tale that feels generated by keyword.