Cover Clockwise from top left: Daigo Yamamoto, Haruka Ayase and Rimu Kuwaki in Hirokazu Koreeda’s film ’Sheep in the Box’ (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
Clockwise from top left: Daigo Yamamoto, Haruka Ayase and Rimu Kuwaki in Hirokazu Koreeda’s film ’Sheep in the Box’ (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
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Do we need androids that can draw us a sheep? Cannes Jury Prize winner Hirokazu Koreeda’s new film ‘Sheep in the Box’ invites the world to reflect on human dependence on AI
Cannes Jury Prize winner Hirokazu Koreeda is far from the first filmmaker to interrogate the complex relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence. Sci-fi classics such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Alex Proyas’s I, Robot (2004), Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) have all explored the blurring boundaries between humans and machines, capturing the psychological anxieties and systemic risks of the digital age.
With his latest feature, Sheep in the Box, the acclaimed Japanese director offers a poignant meditation on society’s growing emotional dependence on AI. The sci-fi drama stars Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto as a grieving couple who adopt a lifelike child humanoid robot following the death of their young son.
Rather than remaining confined to the domestic sphere, the child robot eventually befriends a group of abandoned machines in the neighbourhood, prompting them to embark on a collective journey into a nearby forest to establish a sanctuary of their own.
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Above ‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
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In thematic structure, the narrative shares obvious parallels with Steven Spielberg’s AI (2001), which follows a discarded robotic boy on a quest to find his human mother. In Koreeda’s hands, the artificial child is similarly lifelike, serves as an emotional proxy for devastated parents, and exposes the systemic mistreatment of synthetic life.
However, Koreeda—who openly counts himself as an admirer of Spielberg’s masterpiece—explains that his film has a fundamental difference in perspective. “Instead of focusing strictly on the humanoid’s experience, my movie examines that of the parents. They are the ones who rely on the humanoid for emotional survival,” he says. While the robot remains central to the plot, Koreeda prioritises the unresolved domestic tensions and lingering regrets of the adults.
“The father never managed to say what he truly wanted to say to his son before he passed away. The mother, conversely, is haunted by hurtful words she can never take back,” he says. Unlike more conventional sci-fi narratives, Sheep in the Box illustrates a reality where the parents accept that the machine is not their biological child, viewing it instead as a simulated second chance to heal their deep emotional wounds.
Above ‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
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The film’s title—which functions independently of Philip K Dick’s seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—further emphasises the director’s focus on human psychology. In a pivotal scene, the mother reads Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince as a bedtime story to the robot child. In the classic tale, the Little Prince asks a stranded pilot to draw him a sheep; the pilot, unable to capture the likeness, simply draws a wooden crate and instructs the prince to imagine the sheep inside the box.
The pilot serves as a metaphor for the humanoid robot, whom the mother, who doesn’t know how to process grief, relies on for answers to her emotional void—similar to how the Little Prince asks the pilot to visualise and draw a sheep. As the story unfolds, however, she encounters the limitations of technology, realising that artificial beings lack the creative and emotional capacity required to comprehend true life experiences. The child robot cannot understand why his mother prefers slower, less efficient solutions for her home designs in her work as an architect, nor can he experience fear or pain when leaping from dangerous heights. Ultimately, the mother learns that deep emotional voids cannot be permanently resolved by a mere physical proxy, which is the beautifully engineered robot.
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Above ‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
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“The point of the film is not to force audiences to choose between the father’s perspective, which is defined by confusion over this lifelike being, or the mother’s desperate attempt to believe a comfortable falsehood,” Koreeda explains. “I wanted to present the varied dimensions of regret and pain that humans experience throughout their lives, and explore how we navigate them.”
The primary inspiration for the project stemmed from a rising cultural trend Koreeda observed in mainland China two years ago, where grieving families increasingly turned to generative AI to construct digital clones of their deceased relatives. “A similar phenomenon has been occurring in Japan, where the music industry has attempted to technologically revive late singers,” he adds. “We have officially arrived at an era where the departed can be immortalised through AI, a development that naturally brings ethical debates and discussions.”
As if as a deliberate artistic statement against this digital encroachment, Koreeda strictly cast real human child actors, completely refusing to employ CGI or AI to generate the humanoid’s features. Even the complex sequence where a technician opens up the child robot for internal repair relied entirely on a physical, handmade prop. “Everything this time was handmade; when audiences look at the screen, they might actually sense a slightly retro aesthetic. I want to give the audience a tactile experience, as if they could reach out and touch the robot,” he says.
Above ‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
‘Sheep in the Box’ by Hirokazu Koreeda (Image: courtesy of Edko Films)
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This signature human touch has long defined Koreeda’s celebrated filmography, including earlier works such as Nobody Knows (2004), I Wish (2011) and Like Father, Like Son (2013).
“When working with child actors, I usually give them the basic context of a scene and allow them to express themselves naturally and freely. But given that Sheep in the Box required the depiction of a machine, I had to instruct them to read the script and rehearse lines with me prior to filming,” he says. “That said, their unscripted interactions during downtime often inspired the shoot.” He points to a moment where young actor Rimu Kuwaki, who portrays the robot, gently placed his palms on the head of Ayase as she knelt to help him fasten his shoes. “I initially asked Rimu to place his hands on her shoulder, but his spontaneous gesture proved to be far more moving, so I kept it in the final cut.”
Sheep in the Box, which secured a prestigious nomination for the Palme d’Or in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival and is released in Hong Kong today, June 18, 2026, serves as a powerful reminder for society to critically evaluate its relationship with machinery. While Koreeda refrains from imposing a definitive moral stance on the audience, his beautifully crafted narrative leaves a lingering question: in an age where technology can simulate the voices of those we have lost, how much of our own humanity are we willing to surrender to the machine?
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
