Isaiah Saxon honors puppetry, practical filmmaking in Legend Of Ochi making-of clip

Watch your crown, Baby Yoda; you’re about to have some competition for most adorable puppet-creature in town. Enter Baby Ochi, the elusive and extremely cute magical critter from A24’s forthcoming fantasy adventure, The Legend Of Ochi. In the film—the feature-length debut from music video director Isaiah Saxon—a young girl named Yuri grows up in a fictional society that has taught her to fear the creatures all her life. That’s until she finds a wounded baby ochi all by himself, and learns that things aren’t always as they seem. 

In contrast, the ochi—and the world around both him and Yuri—are almost exactly as they seem. More specifically, they were rendered using a mixture of practical and digital effects; no tennis ball sidekicks here. The ochi specifically was brought to life by five skilled puppeteers, as illustrated in a first look clip shared by A24 today. “You could see all five puppeteers standing around in plainclothes, and if you looked at the puppet, you were like, ‘That’s a real living thing,'” Saxon says in the video, which shows multiple iterations of the puppet’s fabrication.