Writer/director Isaiah Saxon's The Legend of Ochi begins with protagonist Yuri (Helena Zengel) regaling viewers with details about her isolated island home. "We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunsets," she explains. "The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitoes, we have dragons, er. Ochi." This vaguely Icelandic/Romanian land contains little lemur critters called Ochi that are the stuff of nightmares. Yuri's father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) leads a local gaggle of boys, including adopted son Petro (Finn Wolfhard), to hunt these creatures and inspire "valuable" life lessons, like how every problem can be solved with gunfire.
Shortly after an expedition to slaughter some Ochi, Yuri comes across an infant of this species caught in a trap. After freeing the critter, Yuri takes the wounded beast to her home. For so long, Yuri’s lived a stifled life abiding by her father’s strict rules. Now, it’s time for her to take command. She’s running away to return this adolescent Ochi to its home in the mountains. The journey ahead is rife with danger. Even more obstacles emerge once Maxim, with Petro and the other local boys in tow, becomes determined to bring his daughter home.
In 2016's Hell or High Water, there's a striking moment where a man is herding cattle in a creek-bed. This farmer then remarks how preposterous it is that he's still doing what his grandfather did in the 21st century. The camera proceeds to depict this man hustling cattle in the foreground while a modern city lurks in the far background. One of Saxon's earliest Ochi images has a similar intriguing juxtaposition of the old and the new. Here, a horse-drawn carriage is shown lurching down the road. After a few moments, a decidedly new automobile dashes past. On Yuri’s island home, the past and present live together in a contentious relationship.
This great visual disappointingly precedes a hurried first act where key character traits of Yuri and her domestic life (namely her relationship to adopted brother Petro) are only referenced in throwaway dialogue. The Legend of Ochi often feels like a speedrun through the first two How to Train Your Dragon movies. However, that’s especially true in its initial scenes that struggle fleshing out Yuri as a person. Too much screentime is dedicated to flat expository dialogue instead of letting audiences see what everyday life is like in this Ochi-ridden domicile. Without these early critical sequences, it’s difficult to get emotionally invested in The Legend of Ochi’s subsequent narrative.
Luckily, this film’s got an ace up its sleeve: the visuals. The Legend of Ochi is a classical fable told with old-school visual effects techniques like matte paintings and puppets. The little Ochi that the film centers on is extra cuddly and charming simply because it has such immediately tangible fur and facial expressions. Saxon and cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, meanwhile, frame the world of Ochi with lots of bright lived-in colors and an inescapable softness suggesting a tiny layer of frost gathering on the camera lens. These qualities coalesce into a dreamlike visual scheme that’s incredibly unique among modern kids features like A Minecraft Movie that are too enamored with realism.
Between the pleasing color palette and impressive practical effects work, The Legend of Ochi certainly has striking imagery to spare. Composer David Longstreth compliments these visuals with an equally imaginative score that exciting fluctuates throughout in its musical influences. Sometimes, flute-heavy compositions for scenes focusing on Yuri and the Ochi suggest a ballet-infused ambiance. In contrast, Longstreth opts for a more classical adventure movie score for scenes focused on Maxim and his adolescent soldiers. A tender reunion sequence involving Maxim and Dasha (Emily Watson) even incorporates a quasi-mechanical sounding track that sounds like it's emanating from a creaky music box.
The inventiveness permeating The Legend of Ochi’s score and cinematography, though, is frustratingly absent from its script. For some reason, Saxon is as in love with expository dialogue as he is with practical effects wizardry. This means excessive talking keeps undercutting visual wonders filling up the screen. Despite all the chattering, key character relationships still feel undercooked. Neither Yuri nor Maxim are nearly specifically detailed or entertaining enough to justify the predictable trajectory of their fractured father/daughter dynamic.
Saxon’s screenplay also struggles to make Yuri’s grand journey feel consequential. Tremendous obstacles like her falling into a pit, getting separated from her Ochi, or even a grocery store trip gone awry come and go without much meaningful influence on the plot. Other unforgettable stories about children and their unexpected pets like The Iron Giant and How to Train Your Dragon make peril for adolescent characters constantly tangible. Despite Saxon’s writing making welcome room for harsher profanity, alcoholism references, and other darker material, there’s rarely any compelling danger on-screen. The outstanding practical effects work can’t fix weightless drama.
Ochi’s problems even extend to some clunky editing and framing that make the basic geography of certain scenes hard to parse out. Excessively tight framing for a sequence where Maxim encounters a crashed car especially suffers from this problem. The eventual grand finale, meanwhile, has its tearjerker tendencies undercut with clumsy staging. Both the script and camera are frantically jumping around to resolve so many arcs at once that the scene’s pathos suffers. Imagine if Hiro and Baymax’s poignant “I am satisfied with my care” farewell kept getting interrupted by cutting to other Big Hero 6 superheroes and you’ll have an approximation of Ochi’s crowded closing scene.
The Legend of Ochi is often a feast for the eyes in its wide establishing shots, no question about it. Blood, sweat, and tears went into those glorious matte paintings and costumes. The script’s willingness to never talk down to adolescent viewers is also a mighty plus, as is Ochi’s commitment to oddball details like every radio station being dialed to local European music. Unfortunately, Isaiah Saxon’s Ochi vision includes making this a traditional narrative-driven movie. On that front, this endeavor’s too cold and generic to excel. What’s old is always new again in Hollywood. In this case, 43 years after The Dark Crystal, The Legend of Ochi delivers yet another fantasy movie that combines a deluge of visual effects razzle -dazzle with uninspired characters.