The best part of The Legend of Ochi isn't Willem Dafoe slurping stew as it runs down his chin, or the layer of dirt and grime that covers practically everything and everyone on screen. Elevation Pictures' latest family-friendly joint out in theatres this Friday, about a young girl and a fantastical creature embarking on a quest to return home, finds its charm through the titular Ochi.
Fictional primates indigenous to the fictional island of Carpathia, located in the very real body of water that is the Black Sea, ochi are a species of monkey-like creatures. Snub-nosed Sasquatches with golden fur, their very presence on Carpathia alone poses a danger. At least that's what Dafoe's Maxim tells his daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel) as he oversees a band of tweens strapped with rifles and enlisted by their parents to cull the teal-faced apes.
But unlike last year's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, these monkeys aren't CGI — not for the most part, at least. Whenever the simians get up close and personal with The Legend of Ochi's cast, including Finn Wolfhard and Emily Watson, it's all puppeteering and animatronics. The practical effects were done so well that people assumed the film used AI when the first teaser dropped last October, leading director Isaiah Saxon to confirm that there were no CGI touchups on the titular apes. But for one of the film's animatronics designers, Karl Gallivan, the brouhaha became a blessing.
"It's one of those things [that] you can take two ways, really," Gallivan tells Exclaim! over Zoom, calling in from his UK workshop while rocking a White Zombie tee. "I think it's a compliment if people think that it's CGI, and I like proving them wrong," he laughs. A designer whose work has been featured most recently in projects like Jurassic World: Dominion and Bettlejuice Beetlejuice, Gallivan welcomes the challenges that come with creating a new little guy for the adventure movie canon.
"A lot of small puppets have the luxury of being able to have a servo motor outside of the puppet," says Gallivan, explaining for those less knowledgeable in animatronic that servos are tiny motors allowing for precise movements, like blinking eyes or moving the corners of a mouth, and often used in high-end model aircrafts.
"I think I got 24 servos into that head," he remembers. "It's about the size of a grapefruit."
Traditionally, smaller puppets have a collection of servos housed outside of it, but the young ochi's mobility forced the team to build everything within the body. Under every iconic character brought to life via animatronics exists a stainless steel skeleton filled with servos and wires. Beneath all that skin and fur, they all look like the Terminator.
But for young ochi, with their massive, curious eyes (another challenge for Gallivan) and innocent gaze, their charm makes it incredibly hard to imagine their interior. They blink like a real animal, with facial expressions and textures that pass through the uncanny valley and back into reality. It's a member of an endangered species that can survive, if not thrive, in a close-up. But Gallivan's work, along with the team at John Nolan Studio, forms just one piece of the critter's tangibleness.
To bring the rest of the creature to life, Saxon tapped puppeteering veteran Rob Tygner (known for his work in Labyrinth, Muppet Treasure Island and Where the Wild Things Are, and quite simply, "a lovely guy," according to Gallivan) to lead a team of seven puppeteers, all working in tandem to move the young primate around. Like Gallivan, the young ochi had its own growing pains for Tygner.
"The biggest challenge was not running over each other" Tygner recalls. Soft-spoken and radiantly kind, he's exactly who we'd expect a pro-level puppeteer to be, apologizing at one point to pause the interview to answer a call from his wife.
Understandably, considering the creature bounds through the trees like a gibbon and scurries around like a capuchin, Tygner remembers, "We had to do a lot going from A to B. You had one person on the left leg, another person on the right leg, another person on the hind quarters and another person on the back legs. Then you had 2 people on the face, so it was quite a circus when we had the puppet going."
He continues, "But the production was really clever. They took our suggestions and we had a week of going through all the scenes and looking at what we had to do. Because, not only are you trying to stay away from each other, you're also staying as low as possible so they can light the puppet."
He recalls gleefully, "There were some pretty tight spots we had to get into." Tygner shares one particular moment where Yuri and the young ochi find themselves holed up in a supermarket freezer, hiding from the store's staff. In reality, Zengel, Tygner and a couple other puppeteers were cramped in there to make sure young ochi was shivering like a real primate would in sub-zero temperatures.
So much of what makes the young ochi so believable is the amount of direct physical interaction it has with Yuri. For a good chunk of the film, it clings to her back and gazes over her shoulder. As the two bond over their shared adventures, they share the screen, forming a bond as believable as the ochi's existence.
The Legend of Ochi and its components exemplify the collaborative spirit of filmmaking, brought to life by a tight-knit team of artists working with a director who knows what he wants.
"You can tell he's had that story in his head since he was a kid," Gallivan says about working with Saxon, who cut his teeth directing music videos for Grizzly Bear and Björk. "It felt like a personal experience."
A personal experience that found its way to the audience, with the help of a cheeky little ochi.