The Legend of Ochi (Movie)

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    ‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: The Great, Familiar Adventure

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    A 1980s throwback movie about a teenager who sets out on a journey with a mysterious being.There was a pleasing kind of weirdness and danger to a lot of children’s entertainment in the 1980s. Extraterrestrials and fantastical creatures populated the waking dreamscapes of children in those movies, teaching them lessons and helping them to find the courage to face more pedestrian real-life monsters. And because effects hadn’t gotten all digital, even the best of those nonhuman creatures often felt a little janky, like souped-up versions of puppets you might create out of the random bits of craft supplies from your grandma’s closet.It’s very clear that “The Legend of Ochi,” Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature as a writer and director, is an elaborately designed and very effective nostalgia piece for the movies of that time, starting from the title design, which renders each letter in a kind of glowing orange yellow. The movies you’ll think of while you’re watching it are the ones that stuck with you most: For me, “The Neverending Story” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Here the creatures are a little more smoothed out, but the Frank Oz influence is obvious.Those creatures are the Ochi, which look like a cross between tree monkeys and Yoda. In the world of this movie, they are secluded creatures that live in the woods, keeping away from human civilization. The people of Carpathia fear them, hunt them and teach their children to do the same. One man, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), trains the local boys — including the orphaned Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s adopted as his own son — in the best ways to find and kill the Ochi.But Maxim won’t allow his own daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone, and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then, one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ’80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival

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      Girls prevailing against the odds is one theme that has surfaced among the 13 features and 79 short films in this year’s festival in New York.A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again.These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year’s festival, which begins a three-weekend run in Manhattan on Friday, includes 13 features and 79 short films, many of them proudly celebrating girls and women.Although the slate doesn’t neglect films about boys, among them tales of time-traveling brothers and a boatbuilding father-son team, the choices exalt girl power more than any of the festival’s selections in recent memory.“A lot of these stories of strong girls and women are true-to-life stories,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. She referred to two films that have their initial festival showings this weekend (every feature has two screening dates): Erica Tanamachi’s live-action documentary “Home Court” follows the Cambodian American basketball player Ashley Chea from her California preparatory school to her freshman year at Princeton, while the animated “Hola, Frida,” by André Kadi and Karine Vézina, draws on the early years of the artist Frida Kahlo.“Obviously, the story of Frida Kahlo is a story that a lot of people feel like they’re familiar with, but telling it from the perspective of her child self is really interesting,” Villaseñor said.Delivering unusual fare that young viewers might otherwise miss — short films, offbeat independent cinema, subtitled foreign movies — is a hallmark of the festival, now in its 29th year and one of the largest and broadest of its kind. (It also operates classroom programs and a national touring film slate.) And unlike many film fairs for children, the New York festival, which offers program tickets starting at $17 (a full-festival pass is $135), includes multiple screenings for teenagers and even college students, who can see some of their peers’ work in a showcase on March 15.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More