It’s an exciting time for Japan at Cannes this year, as the Marché du Film’s Country of Honor has nearly a dozen diverse features and shorts across the official selection and the sidebars. What’s more, it’s the first time in a quarter century that three Japanese directors have films in competition. Each with a bespoke gentleness to their rhythms, these newest works by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Koji Fukada, and grand master Hirokazu Koreeda have been met with differing degrees of enthusiasm, per the many critics’ grids floating around.
A day before the Palme d’Or awards ceremony, “All of a Sudden,” Hamaguchi’s “effervescent,” nearly 200-minute follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Drive My Car” is considered by many to be a frontrunner. Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” has been respected for its elegance and quietude. However, despite his last four films getting an immense amount of love (“Shoplifters” won the Palme D’Or in 2018), the response has generally skewed negative to Koreeda’s “Sheep in the Box,” a science fiction near-future drama about two grieving parents who adopt a humanoid AI replica of their late seven-year-old son. Or at least audiences have been “surprised,” as IndieWire was, expecting more emotional cogency from the “master sentimentalist.”
Speaking to IndieWire a couple days after the film’s premiere, Koreeda, in his own quiet way, seemed aware of this muted response. “I feel all the interviews today and yesterday have given me a good idea of how people have received the film,” he said. “And what struck me is that it seems a lot of people were expecting some AI dystopian, controlled-by-robots story and that they are surprised that it doesn’t end that way, for better or worse.”
When asked if it felt different to have his film open at Cannes in a year when Japan was the Country of Honor, Koreeda said not really, but added “A lot of groups from Japan who usually don’t get a chance to attend film festivals or would probably only have had a short stay here would have had a very good experience, I think.”
Musing on the large number of films represented, he said, “I think it’s great and I hope that that will continue next year and the year after. But I’m not sure that that [the increased representation] is necessarily thanks to support from the Japanese film industry. The young Japanese directors in competition, Fukada and Hamaguchi, have been on the radar for 10 years or so, and have received more support in France than they have in Japan, probably. I think that’s given Japan something to think about. The Japanese film world needs to put some thought into how to support the next lot of talent coming through.”
While the title “Sheep in the Box” is a hat-tip to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved 20th-century book “The Little Prince,” which features a curious set of illustrations of a sheep and a box, Koreeda’s motivations for writing the film are manifold, per a statement he put out. The idea was sparked when he first read a news article about Chinese businesses using generative AI to bring the deceased back to life. One of the most impactful lines in the film is a question a character asks, ‘Who do the dead really belong to?’ — a query Koreeda has posed in his films as early as “After Life.” A fascination with reanimation and Frankenstein, along with his frustration with the threats to the human imagination AI poses, made him decide to explore these concerns in a film.
Kakeru, the AI humanoid “adopted” by a forty-something middle-class couple in Kamakura, architect Otone Komoto (Ayase Haruka) and woodworker Kensuke Komoto (Daigo), is the same age as their son, whom they lost in an accident a couple of years before the story begins. Koreeda is quick to point out that he wrote humanoid Kakeru to “develop and grow faster than a human child does,” which results in some deeply philosophical — and sometimes unsettling — exchanges within the new nuclear family. At one point, Kakeru attempts to attenuate Otone’s guilt with a statistic: 68% of all moms have at some point decided to abandon their children. On the flip side, when Kakeru shows signs of wanting independence, Otone reasons that there’s nothing new in the idea, since abandonment happens to all parents. Besides, Kakeru, as an AI, shows awareness that he has been programmed not to feel sad.
How did Koreeda come up with these nuanced ideas that contribute to the movie’s underrated thoughtfulness? “It’s basically research,” he said. “For example, when I was trying to figure out what was the relationship that [Otone] has with her mother that is still troubling her, I asked different people, including friends. They said they were traumatized by their mothers saying to them, ‘I’m not going to be your mother anymore.’ That was quite dramatic. So I figured that’s what had happened in this relationship. Her mother had said this to her, and Otone now finds herself part of this chain where she is saying the same thing to her child.”
Here, Koreeda shares that Rimu Kuwaki, the incredible child actor playing Kakeru, didn’t really ask questions about his character’s nature as an AI “because it wasn’t like I had asked him to act like a robot. He was meant to be a child. The adults interacting with him felt a sense of discomfort at times because of the way that he overlapped with their memory of the boy. But it wasn’t something I emphasized for him. For example, when he says to his mom, ‘Would you be happier without me?’ I didn’t tell him to act like a robot but I directed the adults in a way that they would find that uncomfortable.”
The film does well to showcase its three main characters’ perspectives, so I asked Koreeda half-jokingly if he had considered structuring the film the same way he did “Monster,” i.e., in three chapters, each emphasizing and revealing a particular character’s perspective and backstory. Koreeda smiled and said that structure hadn’t crossed his mind. “But the second half of the film, where the humanoid is becoming independent, is growing out of the sight of his parents, and eventually leaves his parents, I think that is similar [to ‘Monster’] in the way that that’s all happening out of the view of the parents.”
From Saint-Exupéry’s book, the sheep in the box notion is adapted to refer to particular characters’ emotions or self-view in the film, so were there any characters who played the equivalent of the book’s unforgettable fox and rose? He said, “The boy who takes out Kakeru’s GPS is the fox. He shares a certain philosophy with him.” And then he chuckled when he said, “I haven’t given any thought to the rose.”
“Sheep in the Box” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Neon will release the film at a later date.
