“A24” and “kids’ movie” aren’t words that have been found in the same sentence much. The closest the studio behind Moonlight, Sing Sing and Uncut Gems came was arguably Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, which was more accessible to kids than it was a kids’ movie.
But The Legend of Ochi is a kids’ movie in all the best possible ways, all the most enriching, magical ways that a kids’ movie should be. It’s also educational, but not in a teaching, preachy fashion. Instead, it’s filled with wisdom and heart, a fabulous tale of the fantastical that will leave your children filled with a sense of wonder about the world.
This is a modern fairy tale, right from the location: the Eastern European region of Carpathia, but transported from landlocked mountains to an unnamed sea with its sheer cliffs and forested slopes all in place. This is where the Ochi live: terrible, bloodthirsty goblins of the woods that steal sheep and murder humans. This is where Maxim (Dafoe) roams and roars, a hunter of Ochi with a pack of young wards whose parents have entrusted to him to turn their farm boys into warriors. And this is where Maxim’s daughter, Yuri (Zengel, News of the World), fumes and mourns for her missing mother, for her father’s denied love. Worse, she is confronted every day by the opportunities she is denied on account of being the only girl in this feral pack, second even to proxy brother Petro (Wolfhard, Stranger Things), who is forced into an equally uncomfortable role. Yuri is the picture of lost potential, right until one of Maxim’s hunts goes wrong and she finds herself the unlikely guardian of a baby Ochi.
This is where storytelling sorcery meets with movie magic. The Ochi are created using puppetry, costumes, and animatronics, moving through a world of hand-crafted matte paintings. In those backgrounds, first-time feature director Isaiah Saxon – best known for creating music videos for Björk and Grizzly Bear – has channeled the arboreal grandeur of fantasy art icons like Michael Whelan and the Brothers Hildebrandt. Their lineage is mixed with the dreamy qualities of classic children’s illustrators such as Arthur Rackham to create a Carpathia that is distant like a dream, but one you can touch and smell as if in a memory regained. It’s truly otherworldly and yet grounded and muddy, a dark conjuring of mist and fog through which Yuri adventures with her tiny charge.
The mystery is deepened through the Ochi themselves. For Maxim, they’re a monster that must be purged through fire and iron. To Dasha (Watson), the enigmatic shepherd in the hills with a wooden hand, they’re mystical creatures beyond human ken. For Yuri, they’re something in between: Carpathia’s wild man of the woods, its yeti or yowie or skunk ape, somewhere between a chimpanzee and a snub-nosed monkey, beautiful and wild. But for the audience, they are truly alive in a way that is rarely seen in modern movies.
The earthy magic spreads to the humans. Dafoe is unhinged in the most perfect way, a little man bombastically trying to paint himself as a warrior. Both he and Watson are the closest anyone has come to putting the scratchy, wild-haired creations of Quentin Blake, Roald Dahl’s favored illustrator, on the big screen. As for Yuri, Zengel imbues her with the spiky determination of a Pippi Longstocking, or Alice at her most contrarian.
What The Legend of Ochi does that fits it in with the best kids’ movies is that it never once condescends to its young viewers. Amid thick accents and Eastern European cultural mores, and themes of failed parenthood and of ecological mayhem, Saxon knows children will keep up because that magic pervades everything. Let it into your heart too.
This article appears in April 25 • 2025.
