Hidden in the thick forest of the fictional island of Carpathia lives the Ochi, an orange-furred primate that communicates through distinct whistling sounds — a song, if you will.
Though these wondrous creatures don’t actually exist, they were very much alive and tangible on the set of A24’s “The Legend of Ochi,” filmmaker Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature, in theaters Friday.
The physically grounded fantasy tracks Yuri (German actor Helena Zengel), a valiant teenage girl, as she tries to reunite a baby Ochi with its mother. She’s caught between the paranoid fears that her father (Willem Dafoe) has about the Ochi, and her estranged mother (Emily Watson), who’s spent her life researching them.
Brimming with impressive practical effects, Saxon’s handcrafted movies — he describes them as “sculptural films” — include music videos for Icelandic musician Björk, who became aware of his work after Saxon co-directed the music video “Knife” for the band Grizzly Bear in 2007 with Sean Hellfritsch (through their L.A.-based studio Encyclopedia Pictura).
For Björk, they made 2008’s “Wanderlust,” which involved puppets, CG elements, stunning matte paintings (one of Saxon’s specialties, also seen in “Ochi”) and live-action performers in stereoscopic 3D to create the illusion of depth. The mind-bending journey feels at once tactile and too fantastical to be real.
When “Ochi” first came to mind, the 42-year-old Saxon first envisioned a relationship between a kid and a strange, misunderstood being, a classic pairing in cinema most popularly exemplified by Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (a movie the director born in the central Californian town of Aptos says he didn’t watch until he was in his 20s).
Nearly 40 artists and technicians worked on Baby Ochi, honing everything from motorized facial movements to skin and fur.
(Alexandru Ionita / A24)
Before landing on the small ape of “The Legend of Ochi,” Saxon first considered a giant oaf and then something closer to the slumbering beast of Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro.” Keeping in mind the arc of the narrative, Saxon realized the imagined life form needed to fit in a backpack to travel with Yuri wherever she goes.
A self-anointed “amateur primatologist” who has given talks about the evidence for the existence of Sasquatch, Saxon leaned into real-life primates for his design, primarily the endangered golden snub-nosed monkey found in remote Chinese mountains.
“The goal was that it felt like it was something from nature, not something from a movie,” says Saxon, boyish with wispy brown hair, during a recent Zoom interview from Sebastopol, Cailf. “I want kids to accept that maybe this is a real place and maybe this is a real animal that they just haven’t discovered yet.”
Saxon maximized the disarming appeal of the snub-nosed monkey by giving his adorable Baby Ochi larger eyes and ears. Though some early reviews of the film have pointed to the “Gremlins” films or “The Mandalorian’s” Grogu (a.k.a. Baby Yoda) as likely references, Saxon maintains he has never seen any of those.
As for his key inspiration for the practical creature in “Ochi,” Saxon recalls being moved by the animatronic mouse in Nicolas Roeg’s gleefully macabre 1990 “The Witches,” which he watched as a kid and describes as a “correct adaptation of Roald Dahl.”
To achieve that level of in-camera wonder, the filmmaker enlisted John Nolan Studio, the storied London-based animatronics outfit with credits on productions ranging from the “Harry Potter” franchise to the more recent “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
Digital renderings were used as a guide for building three real-world Baby Ochis, intended for different scenes and purposes.
(A24)
For Saxon, who first wanted to become an illustrator before going to film school, his choice of mixing puppets with other mediums in his work comes from a desire to make the viewer rethink what’s possible on-screen. “We wanted to confuse the audience to create cinematic magic tricks where your brain gets short-circuited because you can’t fathom what’s happening,” he says.
It’s an impulse that goes back to his time in film school, where Saxon began crafting maquettes of characters, which turned into learning how to do stop-motion animation and eventually into making puppets and prosthetics.
During that span, he met two key figures in his creative development: Daren Rabinovitch, a young artist at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects powerhouse, who was working on the puppets for Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic,” and Hellfritsch. The trio formed Encyclopedia Pictura.
“We fell in love with each other’s art and started making films together,” Saxon remembers. “But we weren’t satisfied with just making it purely animated or purely live-action — or purely anything.”
Saxon first received development funds in 2018 and started working with John Nolan and his team on a prototype of the Baby Ochi puppet. His sketches were converted into 3D digital designs by David Darby, head of sculpting and concept art at Nolan’s studio, working on a software called ZBrush.
A preliminary physical version of the Baby Ochi puppet had no fur and no mechanical functions but was proportionally correct and could already be manipulated using rods attached to each limb and its head, allowing the production to test its movement.
Baby Ochi was mounted on rods, requiring a team of coordinated operators.
(A24)
They discovered that the length of the rods between the puppeteer and the puppet resulted in small, unpredictable variations in the way the fictional quadruped moved.
Saxon refers to this as the “failure space,” which lends realism and charm to the creature.
“If you look at a video of a real baby primate, they have the exact same wiggles and imperfections,” says the filmmaker. “They are still figuring out how to control their body. We immediately were like: Oh, my God, all these imperfections just make it feel real.”
Lead puppeteer Robert Tygner, a longtime veteran in the field whose career began on the David Bowie-starring 1986 cult favorite “Labyrinth,” recalls that during their early technical rehearsals, Saxon brought along director of photography Evan Prosofsky and production designer Jason Kisvarday so they could determine how the sets should be built and where the camera would be placed, considering the space required for the puppeteers.
“That was a real advantage,” Tygner says. “It hasn’t happened to me in many years that a director comes along and wants to really find out the best way to make this puppet work on film.”
It wasn’t until 2021, when Saxon finally got the green-light to go ahead with “Ochi,” that more detailed animatronic puppets were created. In addition to figuring out the ideal dimensions of the body, part of Darby’s initial digital renderings dealt with the prospective fur.
“You can look at anatomy books and try and imagine what a monkey would look like without the fur on,” says Nolan, “but we have to sculpt that in 3D and use Photoshop to work out what the length of hair needs to be and get that sculpt signed off before we actually apply any hair to the physical creature.”
Then it went to the molding team, who 3D-printed the main shape of the puppet with fiberglass molds. The next step was with the skin department, where silicon skins were fabricated and painted.
One of the Ochi heads, adaptable to different shooting scenarios.
(A24)
Nolan explains that all these animatronics are bespoke parts created using 3D printers. The Baby Ochi proved singularly challenging given its small size. Inside its tiny head — about the size of a grapefruit — complex mechanics with around 25 servos were meant to produce subtle facial expressions.
“It’s definitely one of the more complex builds I’ve ever had to design,” says Karl Gallivan, “Ochi’s” animatronic designer.
Baby Ochi’s face was mechanically divided into two segments. This meant that operating the face required two puppeteers: one in charge of the eyes and the eyebrows, and another controlling the mouth. The film’s astounding facial performance is fully practical, without any CGI embellishments, Saxon says.
“Not only did it have to open its eyes wide and blink and have eyelid tracking where your eyes look up and down and your eyelids track your eyes, much like us or a real monkey, but Isaiah also wanted it to whistle,” recalls an enthusiastic Nolan, who believes Saxon was an ideal director to work with. Individual hair follicles were punched in by artists using a tiny needle.
“There are six to seven different departments and there are easily four or five people in each,” says Nolan. “Between 35 and 40 people worked just on Baby Ochi. It’s crazy.”
The painstaking labor, however, pays off the first time the finished product comes alive.
“When you switch on something like Baby Ochi for the first time and you hear the crew gasp, that’s the magic,” adds Nolan. “That’s what the audience will feel when they’re watching it. It feels like it’s really there because it is.”
That means believable enough to interact with actors, including a once-doubtful Dafoe, who associated the word “puppet” with something that lacks autonomy.
“Philosophically, he was deeply skeptical that a puppet could share a scene with him,” Saxon says. “Afterwards, he was shook. It had provided a challenge to his philosophy because it was such a convincing performance across from him. It felt so real, and he was completely drawn into the illusion of it.”
By the time “The Legend of Ochi” was ready to shoot, the operating team was able to interact — and even improvise — with human performers in the moment.
(Alexandru Ionita / A24)
In total, three full-body Baby Ochis were built: the “hero puppet,” as the animatronics team refers to the main creature used in most shots, a stunt Ochi that was more durable and a “backpack Ochi.” That last one saved the production time on set: Normally rigging a puppet into a backpack can take up to an hour, but the backpack Ochi was already in place.
Aside from the three full-body Baby Ochis, a separate removable head was created, which had a screaming expression, which required a more extreme range of motion, and could be replaced onto the hero puppet’s body.
For the adult Ochi, Adrian Parish of Nolan’s team designed animatronics heads with about 30 servos in them that were worn by suit performers. British performer and martial artist Zoe Midgley was cast as Mother Ochi, while two actors local to Romania (where the movie was shot) played the other two adult Ochi.
“It’s a 60-pound head that has to be completely worn naturally and it’s also remote-controlled to get all of what’s happening on the face of Mother Ochi,” says Saxon. Nolan’s team started with a scan and a life cast of Midgley’s body. On top of that they sculpted a muscle suit.
Seasoned primate choreographer Peter Elliott, whose credits include 1988’s “Gorillas in the Mist,” worked with the actors to bring the adult Ochi to life. “Peter was always right there off-camera becoming an ape, snorting, sniffing, acting out and getting the performers into the mood,” says Saxon.
Baby Ochi’s performance, on the other hand, entailed an even more complex dynamic developed from rehearsal sessions in which the puppeteers practiced the creature’s body language enough so that they could improvise on set and react to the other actors.
Tygner would manipulate the head and the upper portion of the torso, and there would be one person on the right arm and another puppeteer on the left arm. A fourth person would work the two back legs and another puppeteer would work the rear end. Two more people would operate the facial expressions remotely, bringing the total to seven.
“It was quite a circus, I can tell you that,” Tygner says, laughing.
On set, animatronics operators and performers in creature suits were directed just as any human actor would be.
(Alexandru Ionita / A24)
Depending on the scenery in a shot, the five puppeteers operating the body wore blue, green or black suits so that they could be digitally removed in post-production.
“All we’ve done is remove the puppeteers,” says Nolan. “It’s still a puppet that’s in camera.”
Tygner believes that it’s not just nostalgia that attracts filmmakers to working with animatronic puppets, but the fact that they can shape the performance on set.
“The biggest advantage of using a puppet is that you can actually direct it like you would an ordinary actor,” Tygner says. “Isaiah treated us just like he would any other actor. We were Ochi.”
Even the distinct sound of the Ochi is real and not digitally fabricated. Surfing YouTube for throat whistlers, Saxon came across a former circus performer named Paul “The Birdman” Manalatos who had developed a signature coo. And that ultimately became the voice of the Ochi.
There are, of course, shortcomings to the puppets. For example, the dexterous hands of the Baby Ochi proved difficult to get to Saxon’s satisfaction given the scale and the film’s budget. And for the puppeteers, showing the feet of the creature making contact with the ground in a believable manner was a challenge. A prop to hide the feet helped the illusion.
“We understand the limitations of animatronics and practical effects, but our job, really, is to keep people guessing,” says Nolan.
Although Saxon has dedicated his life to practical visual wizardry, he believes CG has been too harshly maligned and that there’s a place for both the material and digital worlds to coexist. On “Ochi,” the wide shots that show the creatures jumping or running, particularly in the opening sequences, were entirely created as CG animation.
“The reason that CG and digital VFX got maligned is that there was an overreliance and a kind of laziness that started to develop in the industry where it was like, ‘Just shoot everyone on a blue screen and figure it out later,’” Saxon says.
Saxon does believe there’s been an overreliance on CG in the entertainment industry. And that even when working with the most renowned companies in VFX, there are still qualities, like the way light falls on an object, that look different when there’s something physical on set. We notice it unconsciously, he thinks.
“Our brains are so accepting of puppetry, even when you see the puppeteer above the puppet, your brain can so easily just tune them out and be like: This thing is alive,” says Saxon. “And that’s the magic of it. Life is pouring through the puppet.”
Is it real? Saxon hopes the audiences watching “The Legend of Ochi” are kept in thrall, wondering. As far as these artists know, it is.
