REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.

But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi, does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.

On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of monkey-like creatures called Ochi. These little guys may or may not be eating the sheep herds, but William DeFoe sure thinks they are. Makes sense. These guys totally look like the kinds of beasts that would naturally feast on livestock ... Our protagonist, Yuri, finds one of their young in a trap and spends all of ten seconds deciding whether or not to help it out. Daddy DeFoe's not a fan of this idea, but that's fine and good. Yuri's not a huge fan of her dad either. All interested parties find themselves converging over whether or not this little guy gets to go home.

The real star of the show is the golden monkey on Yuri's shoulder. Ochi reportedly had six different puppeteers orchestrating him at any given moment, resulting in an intricate tactile performance. The best thing we can ask for from this film is that storytellers might be curious to replicate this kind physical filmmaking, willing the fantastical into our world without always relying on the interface of computer-generated creatures.

But tragically, the magic of the puppet-work only winds up working against the movie.

The Ochi are presented as wholly natural in this world. Director Isaiah Saxon likened it to an existing primate species that hadn't featured on a BBC special yet. They are not supernatural and have no magical properties that would trigger the kind of superstitious hysteria that fuels this movie. Neither is Daddy some capitalist overlord trying to raze their territory to build like a shopping mall. The plight of the Ochi has no basis in real world discussions about deforestation, nor of adult distrust of childhood innocence or the concept of progress. And so the movie utterly fails to capture the realities of why people ever hated the mysterious or precious things of the world in the first place.

The movie quickly devolves into a lampoonery session for William DeFoe, who gets to the mouthpiece for some kind of amorphous archaism. William DeFoe hates the little critters because that generation can just be so backwards sometimes, don'cha agree? What attempt there is at psychology winds up feeling very shallow and incurious. The movie has this unspoken suggestion that his character is so mired in traditionalism because he just can't conceive of a world where it was okay for his wife to have left him. Yuri's dad has no microtraumas that would benefit from some examination, only a patriarchal delusion handed to him by some invisible hand in the sky.

More disappointing, there's no sign that Yuri herself ever bought into the propaganda she was raised on. And so her rescue of and subsequent adventure with the creature carries no thematic weight. Helena Zengel herself plays a believable weird girl, but her character is not being challenged and is taking no leap of faith. This is How to Train Your Dragon where it never crosses Hiccup's mind that the dragon might kill him if he lets it go. Congratulations, Yuri, for finding it in your heart to not kill fluffy Grogu ...

There are fleeting suggestions of ET that make you wish the movie was better than it actually is. Mostly in the golden lighting, or the wide shots of the mountain scape. I love childhood reverence for the mystical as much as the next film critic, but this film isn't really about the natural love children have for the small things of the world, or the tease of future discovery. It's about grown-ups.

Even if it doesn't want to be.

--The Professor

Comments

"What Are Happy Endings For Anyway?" (II) - The Docks of New York

Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land . My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time , “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.” The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why...

REVIEW: Forgotten Island

It's fun to consider whether or not you chose your friends or whether they chose you, particularly when it seems you and your friends have nothing in common. That's certainly true of Raissa and Jo, the protagonists of Dreamworks' newest film, but they are nonetheless determined to keep hold of one another, and have been since one fateful meeting outside the principal's office when they were kids--even as Raissa's looming departure for college across the seas threatens to tear them apart. The night before Raissa leaves, forces beyond their control draw Jo and Raissa to Nakali, the Forgotten Island from the stories Jo's grandmother told them as children. It's a dream come true. But this island's magic is mysterious. Jo and Raissa wake up on the beach and realize they have approximately 12 hours unaccounted for. Moreover, they had a ticket home, but its location is buried somewhere in that time gap, in memories lost. Trying ...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre

Anytime I’m getting ready for a new musical film, I generally try to put off listening to the soundtrack until after I’ve seen the movie. It’s just my way of ensuring that I experience the narrative in its full context upon its important premiere viewing. Most of the time I’m good about sticking to this, but nowhere is this feat harder than with the arrival of each new Disney musical. I tried really hard with Encanto , but with Lin-Manuel Miranda writing for Disney, what can I say (except "You're Welcome"...) So, why am I talking about Disney musicals? W hen I premiered my Jungle Book essay earlier this year, I decided that going forward I was ready to expand how I talked about Disney. Owing to Disney fans constantly having to justify their fandom, a lot of Disney discourse tends to be purely defensive. Disney fans only ever get to use their platform to try convincing the cool kids that--for the last time!--it's okay for adults without kids to go to...

REVIEW: Disenchanted

Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring. But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking. But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with. I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been pr...

REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul , dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends. Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he ca...

REVIEW: Jungle Cruise

Disney has relied on branding for their box-office since Walt himself started using fairy-tales as a launching pad. Flash forward 80 years, and the branding wars have escalated not just within the Disney company, but the industry all around. Disney's Jungle Cruise walks the line between original and remix, and not just because it's adapted from a theme-park ride. This film, a pastiche of adventure flicks over the last 60 years, absorbs the best from its sources of inspiration but falls just short of congealing them into something truly groundbreaking. Tales a mythical tree of life have beckoned explorers since it bloomed into legend hundreds of years ago. This catches the interest of explorer Lily Houghton who makes it her mission to find the tree, first to distribute its gifts to the world and second to keep it from the hands of less benevolent seekers. Her success hinges on joining forces with the gruff Frank Wolff. He'll ferry Lily and her brother, McGregor, across th...

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s 'Aladdin' in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with 'Inside Out 2' and 'Zootopia 2' topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely...

REVIEW: COYOTE VS. ACME

The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media. But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth. I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting. Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs so...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 10 Movie Theater Experiences That Changed Me

So, January 2012: Disney is rereleasing their 1991 animated masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast into theaters, and in 3D format, and I'm able to coerce a friend into seeing it with me. This was a big deal because, as with most of the Disney movies we'd call "classic," Beauty and the Beast had its day in theaters before my time, and this was an opportunity to experience the movie in its proper element, and maybe imagine what it would have been when the legendary tunes by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken graced the public for the first time. My larger circle was none-too-impressed with my choice. Didn't I know that the movie was already on DVD? That I could just watch it anytime in the comfort of my own home without having to pay for another ticket? How could I be so careless with my finances? (Incidentally, many of these same friends would pay top-dollar to see the Beauty and the Beast remake five years later on opening weekend ...) ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog