There’s a small A24 family film out called The Legend of Ochi, based on an original script by the writer-director Isaiah Saxon, who cocreated the children’s educational site DIY.org and founded Encyclopedia Pictura, an art collective making short films and music videos for performers like Björk. Legend is Saxon’s feature film debut, and it isn’t getting much attention yet from potential viewers flooding the multiplex to see Sinners and maybe A Minecraft Movie for the second or third time.

The Legend of Ochi is a better, spikier film than I expected, given the marketing campaign, which makes it look like a twee kids’ fantasy with a terrible case of the cutes.

In a way, it’s not the marketers’ fault, because it’s hard to avoid striking twee notes when describing the film. It’s a live-action-plus-puppets-and-animatronics-and-CGI fantasy-adventure film about a lonely preteen girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) raised to fear the elusive forest creatures called ochi. She defies her family and community when she finds an injured baby ochi and embarks on an adventure to reunite the creature with its family.

Given that, how could it be anything but a glutinous mass of sentimentality with a vaguely environmentalist message?

The eccentric setting of the film helps, as do the darkly comic characters. Shot in Romania, the film depicts a remote, rugged, muddy, and entirely fictional village in the Carpathian Mountains. The inhabitants live in a community that combines the ancient and the modern, with crude, boxy cars driven past sword-bearing locals on horseback. Yuri’s father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), is a lonely and fanatical ochi tracker spouting old-world religious platitudes and strutting around in fake neo-Roman armor, training up a ragtag band of local boys to hunt the ochi with rusty muskets plus more tech-savvy radar gizmos.

Maxim is obsessed by the loss of his wife, Dasha (Emily Watson), whom he claims was “taken” by the ochi, though we’ll soon find out the ochi are being scapegoated for every problem in the village and that Dasha’s disappearance is just another example. She’s eventually discovered by Yuri living in a remote mountainside shack, where she tends sheep and lives a hardy life alone, getting by very well despite the handicap of having one wooden hand.

That hand reminds us of the wooden finger on the hand of another frustrated woman: Margot, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a reference to the cinema of Wes Anderson, which is clearly an influence on the ironic and impassive tone of The Legend of Ochi overall, along with the expressionless, distrait, Andersonian line delivery of many of the actors.

Yuri’s teenage older brother, Petro (Finn Wolfhard), is entirely under his father’s sway in pseudo-military training, and he’s “only nice when no one else is around,” according to Yuri. Yuri, played with an excellent deadpan delivery by Zengel, listens to metal music and regards the guyish regime around her with a jaundiced eye. She tags along after her father and the boys on a nighttime ochi hunt, but it’s a ridiculously destructive process that includes trying to trap a sleeping herd of ochis that are no threat to anyone, shooting wildly in all directions, and setting a forest fire.

When Yuri finds a surviving but injured baby ochi and runs off with it, she leaves her father a farewell note, giving as one of her reasons for striking out on her own “I’m cooler than you.” This is so manifestly true that the entire film becomes a mini manifesto in favor of children’s empowerment. As Saxon puts it,

I hope that this inspires a sense that [kids] should trust their intuition, gut, and nose. Don’t listen to your parents; go do what you want to do. They’ll figure it out and have to get on board eventually. Don’t let anyone put you in the corner. Go forth.

The ochi, blue-skinned creatures with russet-gold fur and big eyes and ears, were based on real animals, including the Chinese golden snub-nosed monkey, in the hopes, Saxon says, of making the ochi seem like “a real, undiscovered primate.”

They were built as puppets with animatronic faces by leading film industry puppeteer Robert Tygner (who worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Witches, and Labyrinth) in order to give them weight and mass in the film, a welcome change from the endless cut-rate CGI that’s usually forced on us in the cineplex. The combination of old and new techniques pays tribute to 1980s-era fantasy films like E. T., Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal, while updating them with a limited use of computer imaging. As Saxon explains,

We’re shooting on location with matte paintings, with a puppet, with suit performers, mixing it with real actors. Hopefully the brain can just surrender and say, “I don’t know how they’re doing this. This is magical.”

The Legend of Ochi is paced a bit ploddingly and without many surprises — from early on, you can guess how the narrative is going to unspool. But the details of its Carpathian neverland are delightfully different from what we’re used to seeing, and the actors all give excellent performances, with Dafoe and Watson especially good at conveying tough old-world earthiness.

The film is manifestly the creation of many loving hands, and Saxon is committed to a handcrafted aesthetic even if he’s happy to include a bit of discreet CGI in the mix. As AI-over-everything is being advocated in the film industry as well as everywhere else, Saxon is standing for the alternative:

I’m sure that AI is gonna be approached [as a means of creating film effects] for new generations of kids, but my skepticism about it is this: Just how much is it really taking of you to make it? A lot of what we’ve seen in AI so far is people who’d rather have done the work and be at the end of the process than people who want to do the work. But the doing is where everything is. It’s not in having done.

By “everything,” Saxon seems to mean creative passion invested in the arts that can achieve expressive effects that move us. It’s strange that such a stance would have to be argued for, as if it were a daring or at least very offbeat position. But here we are.