The Legend of Ochi, a scrappy and darkly whimsical fable about a misunderstood teenage girl on a dangerous quest, has the feeling of a film you might have stumbled on and loved as a kid. Something tactile, something fantastical and, maybe, something a little dangerous — the kind of movie you knew you probably weren’t supposed to be seeing just yet. They’re the ones that tend to linger, like that strange English dub of the Norwegian adventure Shipwrecked that I once saw on the Disney Channel at an impressionable age.
Perhaps this is something familiar only to those first home video generations, from a naive, pre-social media era when the movies that you loved felt like your own personal discovery and secret, no matter if it was Star Wars or The NeverEnding Story. How disappointing it was to learn later that everyone else loved them too.
It’s no surprise that The Legend of Ochi was made by someone (Isaiah Saxon) in this zone — an older millennial shaped by some combination of E.T., The Black Stallion and the Palm Pictures’ Directors Label box set. Those DVDs taught many a cinephile about the transportive possibilities of music videos dreamt up by Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry for artists like Aphex Twin, Daft Punk and Björk (for whom Saxon would direct the “Wanderlust” video).
That music video energy and committed world building is evident in Ochi, in a positive way. It’s a description that seems to be used more pejoratively than not, like shallowly dismissing something pretty as a perfume commercial. But perhaps those people just haven’t seen the good ones.
