A24’s amazing looking Ochi film highlighted the lack of brain cells in the average Twitter post, with AI scaremongering looking for engagement

Every now and then a neat little film comes along that gets a lot of criticism for very silly reasons. Now it’s A24’s turn to face the AI-related criticism, just because Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi looks charmingly clean.

Starring Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson and Willem Dafoe, the film is about a girl on the run after she finds a strange little guy from a rare species that is feared by the local population in the north and is immediately hunted. It looks pretty great and harmless, like classic Amblin meets Wes Anderson, but the generative AI-generated crap we’ve been subjected to over the last two years or so has affected many people’s perceptions. If you combine that with commitment/rage farming, which is a career choice for many, you get a shitstorm!

Filming for The Legend of Ochi began in Romania in late 2021 and had been in the works long before that, with writer-director Isaiah Saxon claiming he had been cooking the film for over six years on a $10 million budget. Of course, he’s very angry (but shockingly polite) that armchair cinephiles are now starting random “AI witch hunts.”

Before we move on, check out the adorable first look at the film below:

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Sure, the narrative presented here doesn’t look groundbreaking, but I personally like all sorts of stories as long as they’re well told and look enticing, and The Legend of Ochi certainly has a unique look and feel. hearty in a way that differs from your average big blockbuster.

However, the worst types you know on what we like to call film Twitter have seized the opportunity to unknowingly assume that generative AI was used in the film, especially because the camera work and lighting look pretty clean and the camera movements are slow and, in most cases, methodical. It’s a little hard to put it into words properly, but if you’ve seen AI-generated crap in your feed, you know what I’m talking about. It has a bit of that The scary feeling about it. The big difference is that it doesn’t look like shit. Quite the opposite.

I suspect that the fact that the film revolves around some kind of Grogu-monkey hybrid also makes paranoid moviegoers suspicious, but again, Saxon confirmed that it is the result of puppets and animatronics. Likewise, everything in the film is a mix of real locations, matte paintings (which we used to love), and some traditional 3D work. Saxon previously directed music videos for Björk, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors and Kanye West. He is also the co-founder of the animation studio Encyclopedia Pictura and could therefore be described as an artisan.

The Legend of Ochi is currently scheduled to hit theaters on February 28, 2025, at least in the USA. We highly doubt that this stupid discussion will harm the theatrical release. If anything, it’s free marketing. We’re more concerned about people’s (in)ability to analyze fiction and art without going crazy as we venture into a technologically toxic cultural hellscape.