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‘The Legend of Ochi’ Director Isaiah Saxon Mixed Puppetry, Animatronics and CG to Create One of the Most Nostalgic and Endearing Worlds at This Year’s Sundance
'The Legend of Ochi's' '80s aesthetics and fantasy elements will endear audiences of a certain, but should charm younger viewers, too.
“The Legend of Ochi” uses a mix of puppetry, animatronics, matte paintings and CG animation to present a breathtaking fantasy world that is so much like our own that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s invented. The movies that inspired our approach to this were “Kes” and “Black Stallion” – for that feeling of a realistic, grounded emotional connection – and then, of course, “E.T.” and “Totoro” for the more dreamlike sense of a creature as the mirror of a child’s unconscious inner world. When you leave the cities of Romania and go deep into the countryside, it feels like entering a time machine to a world where people still drive horse-drawn carts, scythe their fields and build haystacks to feed their animals over the long winter, yet there are still supermarkets and minivans.
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