Sheep In The Box

We are fond of Hirokazu Koreeda—Broker, Like Father, Like Son, Shoplifters—and many more, and it doesn't seem to matter a whole bunch how they're rated. Broker, for example, just cracks 7 on IMDB. Still, when I first looked at Sheep In The Box it had a 5.8 score, and is at 42% on Rotten Tomatoes. You'd almost think Koreeda put Jesus in there or something.

Having seen the film, I can sorta understand the low scores. Nonetheless, we liked this film, and were glad we saw it.

The premise is that a couple lost a child (they're always the last place you look!) a couple years ago and the mother (Haruka Ayase, Our Little Sister, Oppai Volleyball) is not dealing well. She's a successful architect but she's in denial. Her husband (Daigo Yamamoto) is trying to push her along, but he's in his own kind of denial.

The circumstances of the child's death are murky: He may have been murdered—homicide is very rare in Japan, with a few hundred every year—or he may have died accidentally. Whatever the cause, it's a special case that allows the couple to get an AI/robotic replacement.

The dad's against it, but he goes along with it for the mom, and before you can say "Haley Joel Osmont in Steven Spielber's Stanley Kubrick's AI", this alien creature is walking around the house looking just like their dead son. This is when the fun starts.

The mother pretends its the real Kakeru, and tries to sustain this illusion, reading him The Little Prince. That's where the "sheep in the box" comes from. In that book, the pilot is drawing pictures for the prince, who is never quite satisfied. Finally, he draws a box with some holes in it and says, "There's your sheep! In the box!" and this satisfies the boy. And we've just lampshaded our theme.

The more the mother pretends the robot is Kakeru, and derives a sort of healing from that, the more apparent that it is that it's not Kakeru. When she finally confronts that and confesses to the robot (who is grilling her, expecting to be returned), the robot falls off their very precarious, guardrail free (but beautiful) second floor landing and ends up needing (robot) surgery.

On the flipside, the husband treats the robot like a robot, until fake Kakeru remembers an old classmate. The father takes Kakeru out to the railway where the real Kakeru's body is found, because he's convinced that his son was murdered, and he concludes the robot might remember something. But of course the robot only remembers the classmate because it was part of his training data.

As if this weren't enough—and, by gosh, don't you think it oughtta be?—it's very clear that robot Kakeru is his own thing. An unusual aspect of this is that the robot isn't trying to gaslight anyone. It's playing at being a child (7? 9? I forget), but it also has an encyclopedic knowledge of things. It won't pretend to be Kakeru unless the person talking to it wants it to be. It doesn't take any apparent offense to Kakeru's grandmother who tells her daughter "Just have another kid." She also says without shame or embarrassment, "I hate children."

Kakeru-bot is running around with other bots in what could very easily be a horror movie twist. All the bots are getting together when their humans aren't paying attention and planning to runnoft. This a strong theme. And complicating this strong theme is that some of this "form our own world" crowd are human, orphaned and neglected children!

A lot of plot getting in the way of the story, you might say, and probably the main reason for the low marks. This movie has a lot of complex and subtle themes mixed in with its simple and obvious themes. Emotionally, it's kind of all over the place.

We liked it, but we could see the flaws. Like the next new movie we would see, The Rivals of Amziah King, it definitely does not feel like slop, and we were glad we saw it—but it was not entirely successful.