The Legend of Ochi, the review of the film

The Legend of Ochi It is a mix between Gremlins And ET – The extraterrestrialbut it’s not so true either. Isaiah Saxon writes and directs a debut that at the first impression may seem like a simple adventure trip that recalls the fantastic characters and creatures of the works for young people of the eighties. Yet, just below the most immediate reading, we arrive at a work that from its packaging reveals an idea of ​​much more artistic and personal cinema. Not that Joe Dante’s monsters or Steven Spielberg’s alien are not – on the contrary, they are all right.

But in The Legend of Ochi the search for a poeticityof a pictorial picture that is continuously recalled by the hand -drawn backgrounds and a rhythm that is not syncopated that cancels a mainstream use by strength allow the film and the spectators to go into a universe who seems together familiar and unknown. That de The Goonies It has the desire to involve us on an unexpected journey, but whose air belongs to the territories of a Nordic panorama of which the echo of its narrow and mysterious stories are perceived.

When the imagination is not needed (only) the CGI

The protagonist of The Legend of Ochi And Helena Zengel in the role of Yuri, A girl with a conflictual relationship with the father and abandoned by the mother. Yuri decides to save a puppy of ochi, creatures that the parent Maxim – played by Willem Dafoe – He continually tries to kill. The man put on a gang, his right arm is the young Petro, Finn Wolfard DThe Stranger Thingsraised as one of the family. So Yuri will immerse himself in inhospitable places, on the green and humid streets of an undergrowth covered with dew, everything to reunite his unusual friend with his mother. The same that the protagonist has never had, in an attempt not to revive his own trauma even to little Ochi and, in some way, sublimate it in turn.

It is cinema that preserves a part of manualitò, which does not abandon itself to the simple CGI, which wants the creatures of its unreal worlds to be authentic and in some way tangible. Isaiah Saxon reactivates the oldest Sense of Wonderthe sense of wonder, And it builds us above (but also below, inside, around) its film. There are not too many explanations in The Legend of Ochi And, those that are given, are not minimally influential.

In the film, no one is real questions and immediately even the viewer knows that it is useless to try to find rules that give logical order to a world rulled purely by fantasy. The important thing is to know that Yuri’s ochi is true. It is for the protagonist who chooses to take care of it, reviewing something wounded in that puppy; It is for Maxim and his tribe, which considers the species of the oji the cause of all its evils. It is also for the director and the spectators, who attend an animatronic – just like the aforementioned And or the most recent grogu of The Mandalorian – which interacts giving shape, volume and truth to creatures, although in a completely fictitious container, in which it is immediate and wonderful to dive.

A world of pure fantasy for The Legend of Ochi

The use of Animatronics It is not the only artisan solution that The Legend of Ochi Use. Your matte paintings, Paints of backgrounds, they are brothers of those of The Wizard of Oz of Ian Fleming, a technique he used to build his city of emerald, as well as of Star Wars For the Obi-Wan Kenobi scene with the ray between the birds above Bodega Bay for Birds by Alfred Hitchcock.

The replacement of a technology to date so pervasive and predominant in cinema leaves room for something whimsical and He grants the viewer to feel falling into the imagination of the Saxon ideatorto accompany Yuri closely on his path of removal and research of his family. To be totally in a world that is something else, which is and together it is impossible that it exists, that it is far from commercial cinema and yet it speaks of and everyone. After all, the protagonist will also end up being able to speak the incomprehensible language of the Ochi and to the public it will seem to be able to do the same. Understand without intermediation, This is the power of fantasy.