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NBC News
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
How did the creature from 'The Legend of Ochi' get so cute? Director Isaiah Saxon explains
The baby creature from 'The Legend of Ochi' has captured the internet's heart — just as its creators intended. Director Isaiah Saxon tells about how his ideas came to life for the ochi, the name of the wild beasts who live in the forests surrounding a remote village on the fictional island of Carpathia, where the family-friendly movie is set. 'The goal with designing the ochi was to create a realistic-feeling undiscovered primate species, so that a kid watching the film could wonder, 'Have I just not seen the BBC nature special yet on this animal?' Like, this feels like a real animal,' Saxon says. 'The Legend of Ochi,' out April 25, stars Helena Zengel alongside Finn Wolfhard, best known from his role as Mike Wheeler on 'Stranger Things.' When Zengel's character Yuri discovers a baby ochi who has been left behind, she's determined to do whatever it takes to get the adorable creature back to its pack. The pair go on an adventure through woodlands, waters and even a grocery store, where the baby ochi quickly melts the hearts of the characters and viewers alike. Filmed in the Carpathian mountains of Romania, the film takes fantastical elements from its location — but the magic of the baby ochi is that it is a puppet, Wolfhard tells "I didn't see the ochi actually in action until I was on set, and the puppeteers showed me. Basically, they said, 'Do you want to meet him?' And I just looked at the puppet, and it looked up at me and blinked and had head movements,' Wolfhard said. 'It was like a truly real creature.' There are complicated mechanics behind bringing the ochi to life, Wolfhard says, but it all comes together to make the ochi appear like a real-life animal. 'The ochi had a whole team of people, and all the puppeteers are actors because they are all trying to get a very specific performance out of the ochi,' Wolfhard says. 'It was six people piloting one creature, as opposed to just one actor, but they were such amazing performers. That's why I like working with practical effects — it's so fun because you have that human connection with it.' Saxon says inspiration for the gremlins came in part from his longtime obsession with Chinese golden snub-nosed monkeys. He also took elements from lemurs, tarsiers and other primates for the look of the ochi, while borrowing from birdsong and the noises dolphins make for the language the animals use in the film. 'It wasn't looking to movie creatures or mythical creatures. It was looking to nature,' he says. 'I really wanted to pull from the wide variety of superpowers that you do find in nature, and real patterns in zoology, and put them into one fictional animal.' The cuteness factor for the baby ochi was important from the start, Saxon says. After drafting up several drawings of what the ochi would look like for the film, Saxon says he reached out to John Nolan Studios in London to create animatronics for the creatures. 'They made a prototype that was completely furless and had no facial movement, but immediately, the five puppeteers brought it to life, it was just completely convincing that this was a real being,' Saxon recalls. 'It was absolutely adorable from the break.' Saxon says designing the baby ochi as a puppet adds characteristics that play into how lovable the creature becomes throughout the film. 'A lot of the little imperfections that you might see in a baby primate trying to move learn how to move their own body, those are the types of little things that come through in rod puppeteering,' he says. 'So it had that vulnerability from the beginning, from the puppetry.' Once the crew was on set filming in Romania, 'there was a tremendous amount of effort in just like, policing his cuteness,' Saxon says of the baby ochi. He joked about a 'last-minute rhinoplasty' to make the baby's nose cuter after realizing it wasn't quite right, and other situations on set to ensure the creature had the look he was going for. The film, which launched in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on April 17, is headed to theaters nationwide on April 25. But the hype for the charm of the baby ochi is only just beginning, as viewers start to react to the gremlin on social media. 'I just watched THE LEGEND OF OCHI and I want everyone to know that I would die for this little guy,' one user posted on X. 'I completely adored THE LEGEND OF OCHI. It pulls inspiration from Amblin movies like E.T., Jim Henson's classics, and even Ghibli, but still takes tons of *weird* swings that create its own identity full of wonder,' another X user wrote. 'They literally don't make family adventures like this anymore.' 'Just like 'E.T.' was for so many of my generation I hope there's a kid out there whose new favorite movie is THE LEGEND OF OCHI and it inspires them to become a filmmaker,' another X user posted. 'Lovely movie.' Another X user said: 'The Legend of Ochi is a wholesome fantasy adventure. It has really beautiful puppetry and practical effects that really make the Ochi come to life. You love every second baby Ochi is on screen. The world feels very beautiful and unique.' Others, understandably, were just reacting to finding out how adorable the baby ochi is. 'How have I not heard about this darling baby Ochi until today?' a user wrote on X, adding a teary-eyed emoji and two heart-eye emoji. 'In love with this little guy,' another X user said with a heart-eyed emoji. 'can't wait to see the movie!' 'Omg he's perfect,' another replied on X to a photo of the baby ochi puppet wearing a baseball cap. A24, the film's distributor, also joined in on the fun, posting a photo of the baby ochi with its arms raised with the caption, 'When you find out The Legend of Ochi isn't nationwide until next Friday but you need that little guy right now.' 'The Legend of Ochi' debuted in theatres on April 25.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'It feels alive': The Legend of Ochi director on the power of puppets
The Legend of Ochi feels like a film that shouldn't exist today. It's an original story, not an adaptation of an already popular book or comic. It's filled with complex puppetry and practical effects, something many films avoid because CG is simply easier to deal with. And it evokes some of the scarier children's films of the '80s and '90s, like the nightmare-inducing adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches. According to Isaiah Saxon, the film's writer and director, it was a struggle to get The Legend of Ochi made. "The attempt to make the film took longer than the making of the film," he said in an interview on the Engadget Podcast. " I think it's extremely hard to reach kids with your first film because kids are kind of behind this kind of corporatized IP world now. But I really wanted to reach kids with my first film and, and so that's why it took so long." Whenever he received a bit of funding for the film, Saxon says he used it to prototype creatures with London's John Nolan Studios, which has built animatronics for films like Jurassic World Dominion, as well as scouted locations in Romania. "And so, through the three-and-a-half years of this work before I got a green light [to make the film], I had then accrued this visual package that was kind of undeniable," he said. "That's when A24 finally just said, okay we're gonna be bold and risky and this isn't what anyone normally does, but we're gonna believe in you here." The result is a film that feels incredibly personal and distinct. It centers on a young girl, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who is growing up in a tiny village on the island of Carpathia. There the people fear the Ochi, mysterious primates who live in the forests and attack farm animals. Her father Maxim (Willem Dafoe in another unhinged A24 film performance) is a conservative, overly-macho man who leads a band of boys to hunt Ochi. Oh yeah, and he occasionally wears Viking armor. The film begins with the Ochi, who from afar look like menacing monkeys. Yuri was raised to fear them, but after encountering one young Ochi, she begins to reject everything her father taught her. It also helps that the creature looks adorable, with large eyes and protruding ears, it's a bit like The Mandalorian's Grogu (AKA Baby Yoda), but with fur. The infant Ochi is also a complex puppet created by John Nolan Studios, and it looks uncanny at first, since these days we expect it to be computer generated. But it's clearly a physical object, with actual facial movements that Yuri can react to. "Puppetry is such an ancient art form," Saxon said, when I asked why he pushed to make the Ochi a puppet and not a purely CG creature. "We've been making shadows on the cave wall for thousands of years, and our brain as we watch the human hand give life to a character is just fully accepting of it." "And then there's also the charm of the failure space of puppetry. Even when you're not doing it just right, it feels alive. And especially for this baby primate, we found immediately as we were testing the puppet, that the little imperfections that came through rod puppeteering were actually exactly the way that a little baby monkey would be just discovering how to move their own body." Creating a believable puppet is just one problem though, another is orchestrating it effectively on a movie set. "[John Nolan Studios] pushed the limits of what you could do at a really small scale with animatronics," Saxon said. "We were able to prototype for years to build these creatures. And then on set, we have extensively rehearsed every single scene with all these puppeteers. There's five on the body led by Rob Tygner, who's doing the head, and he's kind of calling out the internal monologue of the animal — all its thinking, all its vocalization — so that everyone can sync." Another two people control the puppet's face while staring at monitors, so there's a challenge to making them all work as one entity, Saxon says. The film's sets are also built to hold all of the people who control the Ochi puppet, and who often need to be hidden from view. And then there are the suit performers. "We have small people in ape suits with hand extensions with heavy animatronic heads that they can barely see out of. They're hot and they're out in the Carpathian wilderness in the mountains of Transylvania," Saxon said. After seeing what he accomplished with The Legend of Ochi, it's not hard to see Disney tapping Saxon for something in the Marvel universe, like it has with so many independent filmmakers. But that likely won't happen. "I've already said no," Saxon remarked in regards to making a Marvel film, and he also has no desire to make anything based on an existing IP. Saxon isn't entirely against using digital tools, despite his obvious love for puppetry. The Legend of Ochi still uses CG for distant shots of the Ochi, and for creating virtual sets. "I've also, over the years, learned CG and I've made purely animated 3D films. And I know the software myself and I know that it's a bespoke craft art that is tedious and full of love and attention to detail." "It doesn't get the respect it deserves," he added. "And that's partly because there's been a kind of corporatization and overuse of CG a lot.' Saxon says he was well aware a CG character couldn't carry the film, but he also knew that it was the best way to create a 3D river that didn't exist in Romania. (It's also reminiscent of the music video he directed for Bjork's 'Wanderlust.') "You have to look at each opportunity and come to the technique organically for the task. You can't have philosophies about this."
