The Legend of Ochi director Isaiah Saxon goes to great lengths to reveal how puppetry, animatronics, CGI and other traditional tools were used to create his mythical ochi creatures for his upcoming A24 film.

“As we were shooting, you could see all five puppeteers standing around in plain clothes. If you looked at the puppet, you’d say ‘that’s a real living thing,'” Saxon says at one point in the short featurette for the film, which hits theaters April 25 after bowing at Sundance.

The look at the film follows October’s first trailer for Legend of Ochi, which was greeted by a slew of online claims that generative AI was used to create the mysterious ochi monsters. He denied this at the time.

The first-look teaser showed interactions between the shy daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel) and a wounded orphan ochi she discovered. Defying her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe...