\n\tHirokazu Koreeda brings his customary warmth and generosity of spirit to the seemingly cold presence of GenAI in our lives in\u00a0Sheep in the Box\u00a0(Hako no naka no hitsuji), in which grieving parents hope to ease their pain by embracing a humanoid built in their dead son\u2019s image. The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas \u2014 chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.<\/p>\n
\n\tFamily dynamics have frequently been at the heart of Koreeda\u2019s films, invariably distinguished by his exceptional direction of children. Something of a motif in his work is the resilience and resourcefulness of kids, which continues here with a robot that outgrows the need for his adoptive parents, just as flesh-and-blood children do when it\u2019s time to seek independence. But these and other thematic threads lack both definition and emotional heft, making the movie feel flimsy, especially considering its two-hours-plus run time.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tSheep in the Box\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tBeautifully made but thematically woolly.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Haruka Ayase,\u00a0Daigo, Rimu Kuwaki
Director-screenwriter: Hirokazu Kore-eda
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 6 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tDespite occasional detours into fantasy like 1998\u2019s sublime\u00a0After Life, Koreeda is fundamentally a naturalistic filmmaker with a marked humanist vein that has often tagged him as an Ozu descendant. Which makes the prospect of him tackling a near-future sci-fi scenario sound of interest. The droll futuristic touches of the opening scenes \u2014 a delivery drone that could pass for a mini-UFO carrying parcels high above a city coastline; a robot crossing guard trailed by a string of children \u2014 hold the promise of low-key humor.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat drone touches down at the address of architect Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase), who designed her family\u2019s modernist home, an arrangement of overlapping boxes stacked around a garden courtyard. It was built by her carpentry and construction tradesman husband Kensuke (Japanese TV comic Daigo). When the camera pans to a framed photo of their 7-year-old son Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), composer\u00a0Yuta Bandoh\u2019s melancholy score provides an unsubtle hint that the boy is no longer with them.<\/p>\n
\n\tOne of the parcels delivered contains a heart-shaped package that opens to release a hologram of a luna moth, the logo of a company called REbirth that specializes in generative AI humanoid replicas of deceased loved ones. It turns out the Komotos were first approached by a rep two years earlier at their son\u2019s funeral and are eligible for a free promotional trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tOtone is somewhat curious, given how acutely she still feels Kakeru\u2019s absence, but Kensuke is more skeptical. They make an appointment at the REbirth offices and listen to the sales pitch but remain uncertain until a young boy around their son\u2019s age when he died approaches them in the cafeteria. Astonished by how lifelike the robot child is, they sign up for the program, submitting photos, videos and other info on Kakeru to be fed into his design.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen the new model Kakeru is delivered, Otone is overjoyed, even if the boy\u2019s communication skills are basic, at first limited to \u201cMama, I\u2019m home.\u201d But \u201cpapa\u201d is tougher to convince, dismissing the new arrival with cracks about Tamagotchis and Roombas before heading out to play baseball for the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMost directors would look for conflict in the inevitable incompatibilities between grieving parents with human feelings and a humanoid with no emotions and no needs beyond his overnight charging station. But Koreeda dawdles over all that without ever finding much dramatic nuance, making for a dullish midsection.<\/p>\n
\n\tThings come briefly to life when Otone\u2019s judgy mother shows up uninvited, faints at the sight of her dead grandson and then scoffs at the folly of replacing the boy with a machine, reminding Otone that she\u2019s still young enough to have another child. But even that fails to generate tangible drama, as do ongoing tensions about the circumstances of the real Kakeru\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\n\tMore intriguing is the appearance of a youth in black, followed by a handful of other children with whom Kakeru finds kinship as they spend time each day in an abandoned warehouse making mysterious plans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile Koreeda\u2019s take on the existential threat of AI is refreshingly free of violence, rebellion and gloom, it\u2019s also a bit predictable in its conclusion that the humanoids\u2019 accelerated learning capabilities will soon make their human families superfluous. And the writer-director tips his hand by having Kakeru collect the offcuts from Otone\u2019s architectural models and start building his own model in secret.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe film\u2019s most original idea is the instinctual connection of robots to aspects of nature like the networks of trees nourished and protected by a \u201cmother tree\u201d that functions like a central computer hub. Sure, there are dystopian shadings in the inference that robots will form their own communities, leaving people behind. But Kore-eda is more interested in a smiley-happy outcome of mutual accord, which is pushed into sentimental overdrive by increasingly cloying slatherings of Bandoh\u2019s score.<\/p>\n
\n\tShot by Ryuto Kondo, who also served as cinematographer on Koreeda\u2019s wonderful Palme d\u2019Or-winning\u00a0Shoplifters<\/a>\u00a0and the more recent\u00a0Monster<\/a>, the film looks sharp, with lots of striking aerial shots and gorgeous natural light in the many outdoors scenes. It\u2019s also well-acted, notably by Ayase, the lead in Kore-eda\u2019s\u00a0Our Little Sister<\/a>, whose gentle disposition and unforced sweetness are an ideal match for the director\u2019s sensibility.<\/p>\n \n\tBut Sheep in the Box (the title comes from The Little Prince, another motif) is unquestionably a minor entry in the Koreeda canon. If you want to see a stimulating meditation on humanoid-human interaction that\u2019s genuinely moving, seek out Kogonada\u2019s criminally under-appreciated\u00a0After Yang<\/a>, from 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hirokazu Koreeda brings his customary warmth and generosity of spirit to the seemingly cold presence of GenAI in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,11163,22509,18177,25205,25206,703],"class_list":["post-41382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-film-festival-reviews","tag-hirozaku-koreeda","tag-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}