Hirokazu Kore-eda ha participado en apenas medio año en la sección oficial de los dos festivales europeos más importantes, Cannes y Venecia. Si hace unas semanas, Look Back —su bonita oda al manga y a la amistad de dos niñas— logró el aplauso en la Mostra, Kakeru no tuvo la misma suerte unos meses antes en Cannes, donde fue recibida de manera mucho más tibia. Quizá no se trate de una de sus mejores películas (el mayor problema de esta fábula sobre el duelo y la inteligencia artificial es su excesiva frialdad), pero su utopía poshumanista posee interesantes virtudes y, como suele ser habitual en la obra del japonés, propone nuevos caminos a la idea de la familia elegida.
KAKERU (SHEEP IN A BOX)
Dirección: Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Intérpretes: Haruka Ayase, Rimu Kuwaki, Daigo.
Género: drama. Japón, 2026.
Duración: 126 minutos.
Estreno: 16 de octubre.
Hirokazu Kore-eda has participated in only half a year in the official section of the two most important European festivals, Cannes and Venice. A few weeks ago, Look Back, a beautiful ode to manga and the friendship of two girls, received applause at the Mostra. However, Kakeru didn’t have the same luck a few months ago in Cannes, where it was received much more tepidly. Perhaps it’s not one of his best films (the main problem with this fable about grief and artificial intelligence is its excessive coldness), but its posthumanist utopia has interesting merits and, as is often the case in the work of the Japanese filmmaker, it proposes new paths for the concept of the chosen family. More information. The inevitable comparison is with Steven Spielberg’s dark, painful, and masterful melodrama A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), where a robotic child dreams of the unconditional love of the mother who adopts him to alleviate the absence of her sick son. Kore-eda begins with a similar setting, except that here, the son has died in an accident, and because it introduces a robotic child with slightly different future ideas than the sentimental David of A. I. The family of ‘Kakeru’, by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Kore-eda suggests a drama in which the mother’s profession, an architect, and the father’s, the head of a sophisticated woodworking workshop, are key to the staging. Beyond the utopian construction idea that runs through the film, the filmmaker introduces, like Spielberg, universal child references, and that includes those from the American director’s own universe, especially E.T.. If in Spielberg’s drama the story of Pinocchio and his search for the Blue Fairy formed a narrative mirror, Kakeru looks at himself in The Little Prince, by Saint-Exupéry – hence its original title, Sheep in a Box – to inspire his fable about machines and nature. Nevertheless, even though Carlo Collodi’s story is not named, Pinocchio appears in a more conceptual subtext. The profession of the father, conversations about wood or the sequence in which an old carpenter talks to the child robot about the life of trees beyond their death gradually provide clues about how that hidden mystery behind the wood awakens the consciousness of machines. More information.
Even though it’s cold, the new work by the Japanese filmmaker opens up an interesting posthumanist utopia from paternal filial grief.
