Getting a movie made is an almost impossible task, but few seem tougher to get to screens right now than a live-action kids movie. “Boy, that’s true,” said Isaiah Saxon, writer/director of The Legend of Ochi.
Saxon is one of those rare filmmakers to get a theatrical release for a children’s fantasy, but he’s achieved something even more remarkable: The Legend of Ochi is the first kids film released by A24, a distributor better known for contemporary dramas and edgy horror. Now Ochi arrives on Blu-ray this week.
In the fantastical tale, the residents of the fictional island of Carpathia are in a centuries-old war with the Ochi, the local version of the Yeti or Sasquatch, who live in the trees and steal livestock. Blood has been shed on both sides, but when Yuri (Helena Zengel) decides to take a lost young Ochi back to its family after a particularly terrible battle, the two communities must finally reconcile or face extinction.
It’s a true labor of love for Saxon, who may be best known as a director or music videos for artists like Björk (“Wanderlust”) and Grizzly Bear (“Knife”). When he was 25 he had established himself enough to start looking at features. However, he said, “I didn’t get this greenlit until I was 38.”
“[Kids movies have] become a very conservative genre where they spend $100 to $200 million and they make two a year and they all have to be based on existing IP.”
The simple reason was he wanted to make a movie for children, so even by the hurry-up-and-wait standards of the movie business this was a hard slog. “If I’d been smart and made a little indie movie for adults, I could have made it right away,” he said. “Reaching kids requires corporate support. You can’t just make an indie film for kids [and] because it’s become this corporatized thing. It’s become a very conservative genre where they spend $100 to $200 million and they make two a year and they all have to be based on existing IP.”
By pure virtue of being a smaller film with an original story, Ochi has been pigeonholed as a throwback, but that’s a tag that Saxon rejects. “I don’t feel like I’m trying to harken back to older films. It’s just that no one’s made one in a long time.”
When Saxon did finally get the film greenlit, it was just the first hurdle. Although the tale was set on the fictional Island of Carpathia, he wanted to film in the real Carpathia, a remote and landlocked region of Romania, as well as the historic Castel Film Studios in Bucharest. Moreover, he wanted to use traditional filmmaking techniques, such as matte paintings for backgrounds.
Most of all, the Ochi were to be completely realized with practical effects. “The creature work has to be utterly believable and robust,” said Saxon, and this meant working with incredibly complicated puppets and actors in full-body costumes, “with heavy animatronic heads they could barely see out of, out in the Transylvanian wilderness, filming overnight.”
Emily Watson, who plays one-handed sheepherder Dasha, explained that “the whole prospect of taking animatronics up a mountain in Romania sounds insane and I like a bit of insanity.”
Even the sequences filmed on soundstages in Bucharest were uniquely challenging due to the furry central character and the accompanying band of puppeteers. “It was very close work with the whole Ochi team,” said Zengel, and she meant that quite literally. “He had some good bodyguards. He had six people around him who would move him around, and then he had someone who would make his noise.”
“He was a real diva,” added costar Finn Wolfhard.
“He was!” Zengel laughed. “But it was great because it was this very intimate, intense work with the whole team. It was a lot about coordinating with each other and taking the time [and] a lot of waiting to get it right; to have everyone communicate about the scene, everybody knows what’s going on. But it was really fun. He couldn’t complain about me, and I could do whatever, and we could play around with it.”
Dealing with the fantastical and magical is nothing new for Wolfhard, who play Ochi-hunter-in-training Petro. However, as the star of Stranger Things and the Ghostbusters franchise, working with creatures has meant acting opposite tennis balls on green screens. He explained, “I’ve been on a lot of VFX stuff, which is great, and there are so many great VFX artists, but there’s something to be said for working with a practical puppet. … Whenever I got to interact with the Ochi on the set it was incredibly surreal, because it did feel like it was a very real creature. So, it freaked me out a little bit and it also made acting with it a little easier because I didn’t have to imagine anything. I could just react to exactly what the puppet was doing at that time.”
Saxon credited London-based John Nolan Studios for making the Ochi come alive under the most challenging of conditions. “They had just done Jurassic World before this film, so these guys are at the top of their game so I’m just lucky they’d work within my tiny little budget.” They actually spent years of that long development process on working on the Ochi, with Saxon dumping every penny as soon as it came available into traveling to London to audition puppeteers and create the physical language of the Ochi. “So by the time we got to Romania it had been years of attention to detail and we were really confident in it.”
Far riskier than dealing with the human-operated Ochi was wrangling the local Carpathian wildlife and livestock, all of whom most definitely had a mind of their own. “The sheep were terrifying,” Watson said. “I was supposed to wrestle one to the ground and that was not going to happen.”
Just as the Ochi mix the magical and the real, so the humans have an edge of the grimily absurd about them, like the illustrations of Quentin Blake or Tove Jansson come to life. Watson recalled how she was won over by how Saxon described Dasha in the script, calling it “the most come-hither introduction to a character that I could possibly imagine.” She explained, “It was the opposite of saying ‘She clambered out of the pool, glistening with fitness.’ … It described the dash of her car being covered in litter and a dead bird and sweet wrappers, and as her wooden hand is on the steering wheel she’s smoking a cigarette and Italian rock is playing on the radio.”
“You feel like you’re in a time machine when you go there, because there’s horse drawn carriages and people scything their fields by hand and building haystacks.”
In some ways, Dasha personifies the nature of the film, which Saxon described as “big and subtle, and it’s fantastic but it’s grounded and real.” In many ways, he was gifted that grounding by the soil of the Carpathians itself, like scenes shot on with sheep farmers on the Transalpina, the highest elevation paved road in Romania. “It’s a transportive place. You feel like you’re in a time machine when you go there, because there’s horse drawn carriages and people scything their fields by hand and building haystacks.” As for the sheep and their shepherds, he said, “We didn’t truck them in from Hollywood. Those sheep belonged on that mountain, and some of the shepherds were in those shots and we just painted them out.”
Like being able to act off a real puppet, Zengel noted that the location shooting added to the sense of veracity about the film. “It’s so much more intense. When you’re freezing in the movie, you’re probably really freezing. When you’re sweating going up the mountain, you’re actually going up the mountain and sweating.”
“It was a real adventure for all of us and the crew to be up there in the Carpathian Mountains,” Wolfhard added. “It really added to the hand-made feeling and nature of the film.”
Like the best movies for kids, The Legend of Ochi is intended to make children believe in something more than their mundane everyday life. Yet Saxon also made it to encourage other storytellers that there’s more to making movies than blockbusters and dour indies. “I hope this film gives permission to other filmmakers and other studios to allow original, personal stories to be made for kids again.”
The Legend of Ochi is available on Blu-ray now.
This article appears in July 4 • 2025.
