Director Hirokazu Kore-eda / Courtesy of Media Castle
Renowned Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has focused on the concept of unseen imagination as the ultimate message of his new sci-fi film "Sheep in the Box."
The movie, which competed for the Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival last month, follows human parents (Haruka Ayase as the mother and Daigo Yamamoto as the father), who adopt a 7-year-old "humanoid" robot Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) to replace their deceased son.
The film’s title is inspired by an episode in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel “The Little Prince,” where a pilot draws a box and tells the prince a sheep is inside to satisfy the boy's imagination.
Kore-eda gave the film an ambiguous ending where the parents leave the robot boy in a forest because he believes there should be a certain emotional distance between humans and an entirely different entity, like the adopted humanoid.
