Toy Stories

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching actors work with practical effects: You can feel them reacting to them in the moment in a way that’s just different than the whole tennis-ball-on-a-stick thing that’s become so common in big movies over the last couple of decades. Having a physical element on set is more exciting, more risky, more engaging: What if it doesn’t work? What if you step on a cable – or worse, a cable operator? The challenge can loosen up veterans and rekindle a sense of play in younger ones, and the movie almost always benefits.

Case in point: This spring’s The Legend of Ochi, a whimsical fable that marks the feature debut of Isaiah Saxon, an animator and music-video director who built his rep crafting handmade fantasias for the likes of Grizzly Bear and Bjork.

Leaning very heavily on the kids-and-critters movies of the ’80s, The Legend of Ochi follows a young girl named Yuri – her alpha-male papa wanted a boy – who’s been raised, like all the villagers on the island of Carpathia, to believe their security is under constant threat of attack by Ochi, the supposedly ferocious beasts who dwell in the forbidden forests beyond. But when Yuri discovers an injured Ochi cub, she decides to carry it back to safety – a compassionate choice that her militant father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) refuses to sanction. After all, he’s been readying the menfolk of Carpathia for war with the Ochi for as long as anyone can remember.

Yuri is played by Helena Zengel, who you may remember as the German orphan in Tom Hanks’ care in News of the World a few years back; her wide-eyed, watchful presence is well-suited to working with creature effects, and she gives Yuri a hesitancy that reads as tenderness, especially opposite the animatronic Ochi puppet, whose resemblance to The Mandalorian’s Baby Yoda is, apparently, a coincidence. (Saxon has been working on this thing for a very long time.) And while Zengel is no match for Dafoe, she’s not supposed to be; Maxim’s bluster is a deliberate function of his character’s alpha posture. Zengel gets much more to do in her scenes with Emily Watson, who turns up later in the story as her estranged mother.

In addition to E.T., one of Ochi’s key texts is Joe Dante’s Gremlins, the kids-and-creatures picture – and unlikely Christmas classic – that remains the high point of Dante’s rambunctious filmography. Saxon draws most heavily on the first act in his film, borrowing the delicate, Spielbergian moments of Zach Galligan’s innocent Billy bonding with the cuddly, fuzzy Gizmo, avoiding the glorious chaos that follows once the actual gremlins emerge and start, you know, killing people.

The Ochi thus remain more Mogwai than menace, which isn’t exactly disappointing – this isn’t that sort of movie – but it unbalances the central conflict at the film’s heart, since it teases a chaos of its own through Maxim’s youth brigade. They’ve been raised in ignorance by a swaggering fool, trained for a battle that will likely never arrive; all that anger has to go somewhere, right?

The allegory is clear, but the movie doesn’t know where to take it, and that section of The Legend of Ochi just sort of fizzles out as you watch. Wes Anderson did something similar with the scout troop running pointlessly around the island in Moonrise Kingdom, but he incorporated their flailing into the film’s melancholy message that neither the kids nor the grown-ups really know what they’re doing. Saxon doesn’t have a larger statement beyond “can’t we all just get along,” which is unobjectionable, sure, but also sort of unchallenging. We already know to be nice to puppets, right?

As if to remind us that not all kids-and-critters movies are created equal, Paramount Home Entertainment brought Dante’s 1998 curio Small Soldiers to 4K last week. It’s one of the label’s collectible steelbook releases, like last month’s Clueless and To Catch a Thief but those other movies are beloved classics.

I’m not sure who’s been waiting to snap up this one, an odd relic from the early days of DreamWorks SKG, when the fledgling studio tried to establish itself with a string of high-concept blockbusters. This one, an awkward mashup of Gremlins and Toy Story, was one of the oddest – a tonal misfire that still has some really interesting ideas rattling around in there, especially now that we’re in the Age of AI.

The premise is simple enough: Toys come to life! See, this military contractor bought a toy company for some image rehab, and one thing led to another, and now a line of action figures has become sentient, thanks to the weapons-grade computer chips intended to make them interact convincingly with their owners. Imagine a GI Joe with the ingenuity of a veteran soldier and the moral complexity of a Terminator: That’s the Commando Elite, and they’ve ended up in the suburban home of innocent Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith), along with their sworn enemies the Gorgonites. And if Alan is protecting the Gorgonites, whose beastly designs belie their sweet and hapless nature … well, that makes him an enemy too.

Dante has said Small Soldiers started out as an action comedy for teenagers, playing on the creepy logic of military toys actually carrying out the violence they embody – which sounds like exactly what you’d want from the guy who made Gremlins, honestly. But DreamWorks got cold feet, toning down the carnage and destruction and playing up a puppy-love relationship between Alan and his neighbor Christy (Kirsten Dunst) to make the movie more PG than PG-13, even nudging the voice performers to go broader, blunting the dark joke of having the surviving stars of The Dirty Dozen as the Commando Elite. The Gorgonites, meanwhile, were voiced by Frank Langella in full gravitas … and the guys from Spinal Tap. Teenagers might have got the joke; younger viewers absolutely didn’t.

Then again, kids also wouldn’t have appreciated the live-action cast, which Dante filled with comedians and eccentric character actors like David Cross, Jay Mohr, Denis Leary, Kevin Dunn, Ann Magnuson, Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Wendy Schaal and Phil Hartman, in what turned out to be his last role before his death. (The movie is dedicated to his memory.)

They’re all interesting actors, but the performances are all over the shop – Leary is too hard, Cross is too soft, Mohr looks like no one talked to him once he got to set, and so on. The movie is much more interested in the action figures than the people they’re threatening. (And of course it is, the action figures are the gimmick, but … well, Gremlins handled the balance a lot more elegantly.)

Dunn and Magnuson have a nice dynamic as Alan’s confused parents, but Alan himself doesn’t have much in the way of personality; he’s a collection of relatable-kid signifiers like a vaguely fashionable haircut and a Schwinn ten-speed. It doesn’t help that he’s acting opposite Dunst, who even in her early teens is a proper movie star, able to play the ridiculous unreality of the situation. And once Christy embraces her violent streak after being captured by militarized Barbie dolls voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Christina Ricci, she walks off with the picture. But she’s the love interest, not the lead.

At least Small Soldiers looks better than it has in a very long time, in a 4K presentation that considerably improves on the 2021 Paramount Blu-ray, which is also included here. Colors are richer and details are sharper, which has the curious effect of making it much easier to tell whether you’re watching a practical puppet or a CGI character, especially in scenes with human co-stars. (Dante wanted to shoot the whole thing with practical effects, but about two-thirds of the Commando Elite and Gorgonite performances ended up being realized digitally.) Audio is DTS-MA 5.1, which gives Jerry Goldsmith’s lively score some kick and lets those little fireballs land with some accuracy when the Commando Elite mounts a frontal attack on the Abernathy household.

There are no new extras on the 4K disc, and the Blu-ray offers the same short featurette and blooper reel produced for the original Universal DVD. It’s too bad Dante didn’t record a retrospective commentary track, but you can’t blame the guy for wanting to move on.

A24’s Ochi Blu-ray, on the other hand, offers an engaged commentary from writer-director Saxon, as well as a decent production featurette, “The Ochi Quest,” in which he walks us through the world he’s built for himself – and seems to suggest there was a lot more to that world before the studio’s editorial suggestions. (One wonders how much more, since the sole deleted scene is precisely one minute long.)

The feature looks and sounds lovely, though, with Evan Prosofsky’s color palette coming through vivid shades of oranges and yellows; I would have loved to see this one get a 4K release, just to see what those matte paintings look like in HDR. Well, we’ll always have 1080p.

The Legend of Ochi is now available on Blu-ray from A24; Small Soldiers is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray steelbook from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Up next: Imprint gives a long-overlooked Martin Scorsese musical the special edition it deserves, and brings a near-forgotten Gordon Parks picture to disc for the very first time. See you soon!