There was a pleasing kind of weirdness and danger to a lot of children’s entertainment in the 1980s. Extraterrestrials and fantastical creatures populated the waking dreamscapes of children in those movies, teaching them lessons and helping them to find the courage to face more pedestrian real-life monsters. And because effects hadn’t gotten all digital, even the best of those nonhuman creatures often felt a little janky, like souped-up versions of puppets you might create out of the random bits of craft supplies from your grandma’s closet.

It’s clear that “The Legend of Ochi,” Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature as a writer and director, is an elaborately designed and effective nostalgia piece for the movies of that time, starting from the title design, which renders each letter in a kind of glowing orange-yellow. The movies you’ll think of while you’re watching it are the ones that stuck with you most. For me, that means “The Neverending Story” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Here the creatures are a little more smoothed out, but the Frank Oz influence is obvious.

Those creatures are the Ochi, which look like a cross between tree monkeys and Yoda. In the world of this movie, they are secluded creatures that live in the woods, away from human civilization. The people of Carpathia fear them, hunt them and teach their children to do the same. One man, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), trains the local boys — including the orphaned Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s adopted — in the best ways to find and kill the Ochi.

But Maxim won’t allow his daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.

It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ‘80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.

But the attraction of those movies wasn’t just their stories. It was their poetry, the feast they created for our eyes and ears. “The Legend of Ochi” is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses. Mossy greens, vivid landscapes covered in mist and sheep, a glimpse into an elaborate Orthodox church interior, marvelous caves, a world that seems suspended in time between the recent past and the not-very-recent past: It’s immersive in a way that isn’t showy, just lush, with flute melodies wafting on the wind.

There’s plenty that isn’t very subtle about the movie, too. Yuri is into metal, a thing Maxim discovers when he comes into her room looking for her and flips on her stereo, above which hangs a band poster with the slogans “Hell Throne” and “Destroy the Father.” It is, like many of its kind, a movie that externalizes the internal turmoil of feeling like an outsider while also reckoning with the realization that your parents are, after all, just people. In other words, it’s about being a teenager.

And then there are the Ochi, furry creatures who call to one another in registers of pure emotion and song. Of course they’re not the beasts the humans assume they are nor are they the killers they’re scapegoated for being. They’re also just living here in this craggy wilderness, raising their families, living their lives together across generations. In the movies of the 1980s, it was clear where the repeated theme of the frightening stranger — who wasn’t frightening at all — came from, in that final decade of the Cold War. I suppose it’s no surprise that it’s surfacing again.