{"id":43799,"date":"2025-04-23T12:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T12:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/43799\/"},"modified":"2025-04-23T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T12:22:08","slug":"instead-of-breaking-peoples-brains-they-just-went-oh-thats-ai-why-the-legend-of-ochi-sent-the-internet-into-a-tizzy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/43799\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Instead of breaking people\u2019s brains, they just went, \u201cOh, that\u2019s AI\u201d\u2018: Why The Legend of Ochi sent the internet into a tizzy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Emily Watson in a scene from The Legend of Ochi.The Associated Press<\/p>\n

It feels appropriate that director Isaiah Saxon is being interviewed in front of a pile of books that chronicle the work of such arts legends as Bertolt Brecht, Darryl F. Zanuck and Jean-Luc Godard. Sitting inside the in-office library at the New York headquarters of A24, his film\u2019s distributor, Saxon rattles off the many names and movies that shaped his own love of cinema.<\/p>\n

\u201cAround the age of 10, my dad started sharing films with me, taking me to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, where we\u2019d see Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d says Saxon. \u201cThat began my love affair with movies. Which then graduated to stuff like What\u2019s Eating Gilbert Grape, Powder, JFK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet anyone who watches Saxon\u2019s feature directorial debut this weekend, the highly stylized new fantasy The Legend of Ochi, might assume that the filmmaker\u2019s influences were more along the lines of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal or Gremlins \u2013 the kind of eighties childhood catnip whose cute-creature legacies seem baked into Ochi.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy to think I\u2019m drawing on childhood nostalgia here, but I\u2019m just not. I\u2019ve never seen Gremlins. I only saw The NeverEnding Story when I was in my 20s, and even then it was just to look at the effects,\u201d says Saxon. \u201cI would say this movie is just as much influenced by Wim Wenders\u2019s Paris, Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Legend of Ochi follows a young girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) who lives on the fictional island of Carpathia.The Associated Press<\/p>\n

While Saxon clarifies that he\u2019ll get to Gremlins eventually \u2013 and he\u2019s at least seen Gremlins 2: The New Batch \u2013 the prioritization of Wenders over someone like Joe Dante makes sense once you watch Ochi.<\/p>\n

Not so much a zany genre-mash as it is a deeply felt ode to the pains of adolescent loneliness, Ochi follows a young girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) who lives on the fictional island of Carpathia. But her sleepy existence is jolted awake one day when she encounters a lost cub belonging to the goblin-like primates who roam her land \u2013 much to the consternation of Yuri\u2019s father (played with wild-eyed grace by Willem Dafoe). Determined to reunite the baby Ochi with its tribe, Yuri embarks on a surreal adventure across a fantastical land that feels unstuck in time \u2013 a gigantic world that Saxon created for only $10-million.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur whole creature budget was just $1-million, so a lot of it has to do with just cutting all the right corners and none of the wrong ones,\u201d says Saxon, who spent years dreaming up Ochi while directing music videos for the likes of Grizzly Bear and Bjork. \u201cSo much of it has to do with planning. And then the shoot itself is a gun-to-your-head 37 days, filming as much as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Saxon might not have had the resources of his heroes Stanley Kubrick or David Lean, he did have the luxury of time: three years of postproduction work, which allowed him the space to personally create more than 200 matte background paintings, which helped conjure Ochi\u2019s mystical environs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may have shot in the most epic possible landscapes in Romania, but maybe the weather wasn\u2019t right that day, so the matte paintings are about adding in fog and mist, changing anything we can to create the feeling and tone,\u201d explains Saxon. \u201cAnd part of having not as much money is that you can still have the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Willem Dafoe, left, and Finn Wolfhard in a scene from The Legend of Ochi.The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Ironically, the remarkably detailed and crisp visuals of Ochi ended up inspiring a culturally backward discourse online this past fall. After the film\u2019s trailer was released, some spectators immediately thought that the relatively low-budget film looked too clean and too slick to not be enabled by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite disheartening as to what the median film literacy is out there,\u201d says Saxon, who has confirmed that his film is AI-free, created instead with a mixture of puppetry, animatronics, practical special effects and digital VFX.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven before AI, people kind of treated CG as if it was AI. Like \u2018computer generated\u2019 \u2013 you simply ask the computer to make images for you, right? But CG is a bespoke art that\u2019s complicated and full of people who pour their hearts and souls into it. It\u2019s frustrating to work seven years on a film with the goal of trying to break people\u2019s brains \u2013 to create an image that you can\u2019t fathom how exactly it was made. But instead of breaking people\u2019s brains, they just went, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s AI.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The phony AI discourse ended up being the least of Saxon\u2019s concerns, though. Just as he was set to premiere Ochi at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, his Altadena, Calif., home was destroyed in the wildfires.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh man, it was not a good time. I went into Sundance pretty nervous and destabilized. But now, I\u2019ve been able to show it to friends and family in L.A. and see the movie through their eyes,\u201d Saxon says. \u201cNow, I\u2019m dancing through this.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much so that he might even have time to sneak in a screening of Gremlins.<\/p>\n

The Legend of Ochi opens in select theatres April 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Emily Watson in a scene from The Legend of Ochi.The Associated Press It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[6934,6925,6935,1500,6918,6936,943,6917,6930,6931,6927,6919,6916,1700,2266,77,728,6929,6923,6946,6920,6921,1234,6926,388,3611,6607,3943,603,6941,6942,6944,6939,6943,6937,6940,6922,6932,6933,285,3027,6938,6924,53,183,6928,16,15,727,263,6945],"class_list":{"0":"post-43799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-economy","22":"tag-education","23":"tag-entertainment","24":"tag-environment","25":"tag-federal-government","26":"tag-foreign-news","27":"tag-globe-and-mail","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","29":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","30":"tag-government","31":"tag-life-news","32":"tag-lifestyle","33":"tag-local-news","34":"tag-manitoba","35":"tag-movies","36":"tag-national-news","37":"tag-new-brunswick","38":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","39":"tag-northwest-territories","40":"tag-nova-scotia","41":"tag-nunavut","42":"tag-ontario","43":"tag-pei","44":"tag-photos","45":"tag-political-news","46":"tag-political-opinion","47":"tag-politics","48":"tag-politics-news","49":"tag-quebec","50":"tag-sports-news","51":"tag-technology","52":"tag-travel","53":"tag-trudeau","54":"tag-uk","55":"tag-united-kingdom","56":"tag-us-news","57":"tag-world-news","58":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}