While the Californians are increasingly claiming to live among wolves, black bears and mountain lions, a new quirky fantastic film reflects the anxieties of many state residents as to their proximity to fauna.
“The Legend of Ochi”, released in the country’s rooms on April 25 and available in streaming from May 20, follows a quest for tween to return a baby primate to the blue face injured at his home. The Eastern Europe community of Yuri (Helena Zengel), twelve years old, on the fictitious island of Carpathia, has long waged a war with fictitious animals – called Ochi. (His father Maxim, played by Willem Dafoe, is an ochi-hater fervent.)
Bucking the inherited idea that Ochi is vicious creatures to destroy, Yuri finds that she has more in common with the creatures she has learned to believe. The healing of the link between the species also helps to cure links within its own species – that of its immediate family.
Willem Dafoe, on the left, plays Maxim, who runs a group of young boys – including Petro (Finn Wolfhard) – to hunt Ochhi.
(A24)
Isaiah Saxon, raised in Aptos, California, wrote and directed the film produced by the A24, and watching it, it is easy to find links to problems with which the Californians face today. The state is home to what can be the densest population of black bears in the world, an increasing number of gray wolves and large mountain lions in certain regions. Not all residents are satisfied.
From the 1970s, a maritime change in state and federal policy allowed major predators to return to California. Meanwhile, humans have extended into wild areas while a changing climate can lead animals on people’s ways. The increased overlapping of man and the beast led to an increase in conflicts, according to California fauna officials.
Breeders in rural pockets of the state who lose cattle because of wolves for fear for their livelihoods, and a couple said to the Times that they wanted to be able to shoot some of the protected canids – to teach them a lesson. The leaders of the county of Siskiyou and Lasen call on the state to do something about the economic assessment that wolves face from breeders, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife recently approved stronger harassment methods, in particular by aggressing animals with noise of drones.
Galvanized by recent deadly animal attacks – including the first death of the state linked to a black bear in 2023 – Californian legislators called for more severe methods to postpone fauna. A state bill originally aimed at allowing the county of El Dorado to use dogs to hunt mountain lions adopted a state Senate committee last month, but was changed to lose dogs. The state fauna department should now partly improve a conflict reduction program by committing to public awareness and offering funding for measures to protect livestock. A similar bill allowing the use of dogs to hunt black bears far from the places where humans decide that bears are not desired died in a state assembly committee last month, but obtained a review – an opportunity for another vote next year.
But many Californians believe in another type of coexistence – one that often focuses on animal rights to live in their indigenous territory.
Addressing The Times, Saxon said that the anxieties of the fauna of California were not consciously in his mind when he created “Legend of Ochi”, but parallels between the imaginary world of his first feature film and that his original state emerged during a telephone interview.
Saxon, which grew up in the sequoia forests of the County of Santa Cruz, recalled a “constant fear of mountain lions” in the community where it was raised. There was also a fervent believer in Sasquatch and a museum of Santa Cruz dedicated to the mythical shaggy creature.
The 42 -year -old man recalled that “If I walked in the woods, quite far from our house, then Sasquatch or mountain lions, or, you know, a real adventure and a real kind of magic (expected) in the forest. So I think it was somehow deeply in me when I proposed this story. ”
In the mountains it is from, the community often breaks down into “hippies or rednecks”, said Saxon. The way he describes it are coarse terms for a more nuanced fracture of the community: “People who want to live symbiotically with nature, then people who want to make it a force against him.”
When he was about 6 years old, he would visit the family of his best friend in a neighboring property where he would see them shoot on Blue Jays for sport. Then he would return to him vegetarians.
Later in life, he would see the same dichotomy playing elsewhere in California. Saxon moved to Los Angeles about ten years ago and, until Eaton fire burned his house, lived in Altadena. Shortly before moving into the community of foothills about two and a half years ago, he learned that some of his potential neighbors had illegally shot down a mountain lion accused of massacre of animals in the neighborhood, including all the goats on the farm next to what was going to become his house.
Similar acts of vigilante justice animate his film. An opening assembly includes a bloody sheep ostensibly mutilated by an OCHI. Sometimes primates bite when they are afraid. In a scene, Maxim recalls a ragtag gang of young boys whom he tries to raise in qualified hunters for which they are fighting: their families have lost geese, cats, cattle, a feeling of security.
Saxon said that he understood the impulse of rippling violently against an animal that caused damage, but finally standing there.
“It is a spiritual choice to not only withdraw this animal from this situation,” he said. “And by that, what I mean is that you should have respect for the sensitivity and experience of this mountain lion so as not to choose to solve it in this way.”
The goal of the film, said Saxon, was not only to defend the fact of not killing wild animals that live near humans. “It’s not just” don’t destroy them “. It is “we would be better if we learn them,” he said.
In Saxon’s childhood house, Jane Goodall was one of the three saints contained. (The others were the Dalai Lama and the Beatles.) And in a recent conversation with Goodall on the A24 podcast, he described his first feature film as “a criticism of anthropocentrism”.
Films reveal that OCHI can do things that people cannot, like communicating with sensations. And they challenge their caricature of bloody animals with red eyes. The dark globular sports eyes and the blurred fur and caramel color, the baby Ochi – a physical puppet which was compared to a Gremlin and Baby Yoda – is quite cute.
Saxon imbued Yuri’s parents with polarized views of the wildlife. Maxim sees humans as apex beings with the right to control the environment. Dasha, Yuri’s mother (played by Emily Watson), has amply devoted time to studying the Ochi, but – according to Saxon – accepts that nature can sometimes be out of reach of human conception.
Yuri in a whispered voice acts as an avatar of the public, not yet solidified in its values but comprising them alone.
“My hope with the film is that children can enter as curiously and openly as Yuri is in the film, and decide and not let adults prevent what they think is fair and true,” said Saxon.
Children’s films featuring animals often strengthen stereotypes that predatory animals are intrinsically bad. For example, consider the Disney classic “The Little Mermaid” (1989) or the 2004 “Shark Tale” film DreamWorks, which both show sharks and threatening, notes a blog for groups of UC Davis animal behavior. Or “Frozen” from Disney, from 2013, where wolves run as they continue the heroine.
There are exceptions and it can become disorderly. “The Lion King”, the 1994 Disney blockbuster, presents an Apex predator (the titular lion) like the hero – but he must change his behavior to eat larvae as part of his hero’s trip. Meanwhile, the main villain is another lion that remains a predator.
Amaroq Weiss, defender of senior wolves for the Center for Biological Diversity, a non -profit organization dedicated to the protection of endangered animals, believes that positive stories on predators are essential at a time when people and fauna are overwhelming more and more, motivated by human development and climate change.
“For people who live in cities who can now meet wild neighbors and not know much about it, it is an easy way to immediately train a frightening impression,” she said, “who is why it is even more important … that we send the message to such young and early possible people.”
California Daily Newspapers
