In the Japan of the near future, Otone and Kensuke lose their little boy. Not long afterwards they bring home a child-sized humanoid robot, built in the image of the dead Kakeru, which uses artificial intelligence to learn how to be their son. The mother is an architect, the father a carpenter \u2014 both of them work with things that can be built. From there the film is about what can actually be rebuilt of a person, and what cannot.<\/p>\n
Kore-eda started from a news story: he read about Chinese companies using generative AI to bring their clients’ dead relatives back to life. The title, though, doesn’t come from the technology but from The Little Prince \u2014 the scene in which the pilot can’t draw a sheep, so he draws a box and says the sheep the boy wants is inside it. For Kore-eda this is the film’s entire argument: the most important things aren’t visible, they live in the connection that sustains them.<\/p>\n
For the director this is continuation rather than departure. Kore-eda has filmed children who were abandoned, abducted, swapped, surrendered anonymously at birth; this is the first time he has filmed one who was constructed. At one point the film asks who the dead really belong to \u2014 the same question he was already working on back in After Life (1998).<\/p>\n
It was shot on 35mm by Ry\u00fbto Kond\u00f4, who also photographed Shoplifters (2018) and Monster (2023). As usual, Kore-eda edited it himself; the score is by Yuta Bandoh. Haruka Ayase plays Otone, and her performance was singled out by almost every review; the robot child is played by ten-year-old Rimu Kuwaki.<\/p>\n
The film premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2026 \u2014 Kore-eda’s eighth time in the main competition, where he won the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters. The reception was divided: some called it one of the purest and most dreamlike films of his career, while others found the subplots scattered it, and felt the film gestures toward grief and artificial consciousness more than it says anything definite about them. What most reviews agree on is the quality of the performances.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the Japan of the near future, Otone and Kensuke lose their little boy. Not long afterwards they bring home a child-sized humanoid robot, built in the image of the dead Kakeru, which uses artificial intelligence to learn how to be their son. The mother is an architect, the father a carpenter \u2014 both of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35229,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n