Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is once again out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Check out our preview of the 2025 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
What makes a “family” film timeless? For a lot of folks, it means recapturing the aesthetics of the ‘80s — 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’re 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, Flow, etc.), but as it goes, the kind of family fantasy film most people dream of is just that: A wish that they don’t really care about coming true, because it’ll just wind up on streaming someday anyhow. So, it’s exciting that A24 is pushing their chips on to the table and putting out Isaiah Saxon’s fantastic feature The Legend of Ochi later this spring*, because if this doesn’t draw people in, then we’re truly doomed to maudlin Pixar releases raising future generations.
What makes Saxon’s feature stand out so strikingly in the modern kids’ feature landscape isn’t just that it’s frequently *gorgeous* or that it has a compelling yet easy-to-parse story — it’s that it’s 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’re better than the prequels, and that is a truism for more than just that franchise. Be it The Neverending Story, ET, Flight of the Navigator, or (God help you) The Goonies, 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.
Saxon totally rejects this thesis — he’s 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’s on display here. Yet its wonder isn’t 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 — a strange sort of timelessness (though you won’t see a phone in site).
This small island in the black sea, seemingly plucked from one of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits 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’re not what you’d consider to be top-of-the-line: aside from the aged and grieving soldier under the faux-Viking armor, they’re just a bunch of teenage kids with bolt-action rifles. Their number includes Maxim’s daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who would much rather be doing anything else than trying to kill these creatures. Sure, she’s scared of the creatures, but she’s just as frightened of her father’s 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’s mountain range. It’s a disappointing and lonely life — her estrangement with her father and her unhelpful yet secretly kind adopted brother (Finn Wolfhard) means her world is mostly cold and spartan.
That is until she goes out one night to check her father’s traps and discovers a Baby Ochi caught in one (I will be calling him Baby Ochi, given that he doesn’t have a given name and is heartbreakingly cute, much like Baby Yoda). His leg’s been broken by the trap’s metal teeth, and Yuri has a choice to make: Either she listens to her dad’s fables and kills him with her grandfather’s knife or she looks into those beautiful eyes and spares the baby. You know what choice she’s going to make — it’s a kid’s movie, after all. So she frees him and takes the Baby Ochi home to nurse his wounds, and discovers that they’re sensitive and incredibly intelligent creatures, who sing to each other in a musical language impossible for humans to understand. These revelations — and the danger she’s put herself in by having the critter in her house — 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.
There’s an element of melancholy to Ochi that feels on point — I keep going back to Gilliam because it reminds me so much of Time Bandits, in terms of its mixture of tenderheart sadness and adventure-humor. Yet it’s a kind movie that doesn’t 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’s 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’s never preachy.
For all of the eco-friendly bonafides that A24 stresses in the marketing, it’s not fucking Ferngully, and Saxon refuses to break the construct of the lovely reality that he’s creates to tell you to recycle. It lets the kids learn these lessons through the power of cinematic storytelling. That’s 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’t 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.
*Ochi was originally a February release, but it had to be moved due to Saxon’s home tragically burning down in the LA fires — we wish him the best, as well, in this awful time