Sheep in the Box

Failing that, he’d at least like to understand what it means to be human. To learn about the world, himself, and everything in between, he turns to the same people most children do: his parents. Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) aren’t actually his parents, though, and only one of them wants him in the house. They’ve been devastated since the real Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) died in an unspecified accident two years ago, and the artificial replacement only divides them further. Otone welcomes the idea of redirecting her maternal instincts toward him (or it), whereas Kensuke is none too pleased with the idea of bringing a robot into the home: “I’m not your papa,” he tells the boy bluntly in an early scene. Parents just don’t understand, especially when their child isn’t human.

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Sheep in the Box is the latest from writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda, arguably Japan’s most celebrated filmmaker. He received an Academy Award nomination and won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for Shoplifters, a characteristically heartbreaking family drama, and has been exploring fractured filial bonds in movies like Still Walking and Our Little Sister throughout his 30-year career. He’s a humanist above all, which is what makes him the perfect director to muse about artificial intelligence. (It helps that this isn’t his first time doing so: 2009’s Air Doll tells of an inflatable sex doll that becomes sentient and falls in love.)

There are no strings on the artificial humanoid, which was created by a company named REbirth whose products are designed for grieving families, but accepting Kakeru does come with certain strings: namely, the uncanny-valley effect of welcoming something into your home that both is and is not your deceased loved one. It’s a familiar setup, but so are most of Kore-eda’s premises. And while he certainly contributes more to the ongoing AI discourse than a conversation with ChatGPT would, Sheep in the Box doesn’t rank among his more fully realized efforts. Its ideas are timely, but its execution is old-fashioned.

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Which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of wonder and pathos sprinkled throughout. Kakeru is far from robotic despite quite literally being a robot, and a subplot that finds him joining up with other artificial children proves to be the film’s most compelling. His fellow humanoids understand him better than his parents, and together they understand a vital truth better than any adults in the film are willing or able to: that they are not and will never be human and that a gulf will always exist between them and the mourning relatives they were created to console.

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That’s eventually as true for Kakeru’s mother as it is for his father. In their tensest exchange, she tells the boy to “stop staring inside me” after being made uncomfortable by his piercing gaze. What can he see that the real Kakeru couldn’t, and why does it bother her so much? As with most light sci-fi, Sheep in the Box takes place in the “not too distant future” and would appear, at first glance, to be a warning of what’s to come should we keep following the path we’re on. Kore-eda isn’t as wary of AI as you might imagine, though, and in interviews has said that his film is less a precautionary tale and more an attempt to answer an important ethical question: “Who do the dead truly belong to?”

He’s a humanist above all, which is what makes him the perfect director to muse about artificial intelligence.

Comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s still hard not to think of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence or the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” when watching a movie like Sheep in the Box, which takes a far more muted approach to what’s been heartwrenching material in the past. The more we turn to AI to solve inherently human problems, those earlier works suggested, the more we’ll be disappointed. Kore-eda’s conclusion doesn’t necessarily differ, but his film’s bright aesthetic and string-heavy score feel oddly incongruous with the story he’s telling.

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The film takes its title from a passage in The Little Prince in which the narrator is asked to draw a sheep by the eponymous prince, who’s dissatisfied with his first three attempts. Frustrated, the narrator then draws a box with three holes in it and claims the sheep is inside. To his surprise, the boy loves it: “That’s exactly what I wanted!” he exclaims. Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, whether it be a sheep or a soul.