Ochi legend review: creatures' comfort and a touch too much effort

Taking away by a fantastic world is one of the most rarefied pleasures of Movie covers, the disbelief dissolving as easily as a pill on the tongue. It makes it reach a delicate company. Count the first functionality director Isaiah Saxon Among the most workers and devoted magicians to try it recently with its cryptozoological fable charged with mist “the legend of Ochi”, a paw in the waters of Miyazaki and Spielberg (that is to say the Spielberg of “and” and “Gremlins”, think).

Lots of care – the type handmade, digital and local type – consisted in making this serious and argously funny story of a sliding teenager binding with a threatened fur forest creature. Indeed, determining where the delighted and realistic carpatic geography ends and the effects that magic begins is something of an thankless workforce (and, to be honest, Buzzkilly). At the same time, the own virtuosity of the Saxon writer-director, sometimes aggressive, ultimately leaves our hopes for real emotions that were missing, once we became the flow.

In the mountains of their island community, Yuri (Helena Zengel) is the black sheep of her family without mother. A gentle soul with a barely disguised contempt for the hunting culture favored by his favorite papa-warrior Maxim (a grizzly reliably Willem Dafoe) And silently accepted by his sensitive older brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard), Yuri learned to fear what is beyond their open agricultural land.

But real paranoia is saved for the mysterious primate type species called Ochi, animals that again escape a night hunt led by Yuri's father, ridiculously accessible to armor like a cosplay centurion, leading a group of boys exciting rifles in the region. His hilarious evaluation without deadlock everywhere in the family meal the following night is a growl: “It's stupid.”

Later, by checking the bear traps, however, Yuri meets a baby with a large ears curling in a hole, his bloody back paw. Squiring the house of the creature in her backpack, she soothes her whistling and square terror with simple nursing, then decides that the right thing to do is to bring her new friend together with her family. That this sincere notion stops with an itch to leave his austere and oppressive house only adds to his determination. The quest takes on other dimensions when the linguistic barrier of the pair inexplicably collapses, followed by Yuri meeting his long and absent mother (an Emily Watson, deliciously filthy and altered), a solitary launcher from Mouton who is an Ochi expert, he turns out.

Like many folk films anchored in a recognizable reality, “the legend of Ochi” explains too much about his mythical critters – a work with whom Watson is unfortunately in a heap – when what is called is a touch of narration. Especially since we know where this eccentric confrontation is headed for the human beast against the beast in terms of ecological lessons on harmony between species and dramatic resolutions concerning the stubbornness of parents and children.

Graduate of musical clips, saxon – like the Gondrys And Jonies Before him – excels in rejecting his thread in idiosyncratic humor, the atmosphere and the technique. Brunied by the pictorial cinematography of Evan Prosofsky, “The Legend of Ochi” is a beautiful case for the tactile show of the puppet as perhaps the most intimate enchantment tool.

And yet, at the end of the film, we end up with a smiling admiration for its particularity and its artistic talent instead of a catharsis, because too much “the legend of Ochi” resembles a presentation. The right actors are players more than characters, the parameters are more the sets than the environments and David LongstrethThe orchestral partition filled with crescendo (like the avant-garde John Williams in his best moments) feels too often insistent as convincing. It is a jewelry box of a film, for sure, with a nice message inside, but you lose in your world is where it is short.