Spike Jonze's "I'm Here" the Funniest, Saddest Robot Film Ever
It’s hard to overestimate how well the film, about a love affair between two robots, fits today’s setting; since we’re here celebrating the crossover between art and technology, screening a short about robots who’ve become living, sentient beings and their struggle to fit into a world which belongs to their fleshy cousins (us) was pretty neat. The title itself fairly elegantly sums up the male robot protagonist Sheldon’s journey through the film; meeting the (robot) girl of his dreams and growing close, it’s in part a story about the challenges of being a second-class citizen. (“You can’t drive a car!”, rails an old lady to Sheldon’s love interest as she pulls up at his bus stop at their first meeting).
With the same slightly detached viewpoint as Being John Malkovich comes a laudable economy in the use of settings and landscape to portray emotional movements that in a feature would be teased out over a longer period (the film’s just 30 minutes long). When Jonze needs to show the humanity of his lead characters, for example, he puts them skipping through a forest, holding hands and jumping out from behind trees; on one level, it’s the juxtaposition that captures our imagination (if you were watching a human couple in such a hackneyed display of affection you’d scream cliché), and on another it’s the fact that they’re surrounded by nature that makes them natural.
At its heart though is a bitter irony, as we watch Sheldon fall head over heels in love with a robot girl so clumsy that she almost routinely loses parts of her mechanical anatomy. Each time (and we’re getting deep into spoiler territory here), Sheldon proffers one of his own limbs as a replacement, until in the final instance we watch his dash to a hospital to see his girlfriend in two pieces on a surgical table, with the prospects looking bleak. You’ll have to watch the film to find out the rest, although I suspect no home viewing will quite capture the effect achieved at the Creators Project; as the film drew to a close the screen lifted up to reveal the soundtrack band, fronted by Aska Matsumiya, playing the outro music live, to a brief gasp from the assembled audience. It was very cool, and the song, “There are many of us”, is dark and haunting in a way that fitted the film perfectly.
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