Inside Hirokazu Koreeda’s genre-bending ‘Sheep in the Box’
The acclaimed Japanese filmmaker discusses his latest film, rejecting dystopian AI narratives, and why science fiction is simply another way to tell a family story
From left, Haruka Ayase as Otone Komoto, Rimu Kuwaki as Kakeru, and Daigo Yamamoto as Kensuke Komoto in "Sheep in the Box."
NEON
Words by Andy Crump
As artificial intelligence—whether iterated as generative, predictive, or agentic—comes to occupy greater space in society, and therefore spark justifiable anxieties in all of us (save for the brainwashed tech bro crowd) over its rapid and reckless proliferation, culture will respond with observations about its impacts. Occasionally, it’ll take a guess at what those impacts might be. In movies, this typically means casting AI in an antagonist role, seen in recent productions like Subservience (2024), Afraid (2024), The Creator (2023), The Electric State (2025), and Mercy (2026), as well as such 2010s-era films as Ex Machina (2014) and Transcendence (2014).
Hirokazu Koreeda, one of Japan’s modern masters of cinema—and among his peers, one of the few to break out on an international stage—takes a different tack in his new movie, Sheep in the Box, in which AI is neither good nor evil, but instead simply “is.” Koreeda eschews didactic messaging in the film, as he tends to throughout all of his movies; he is less interested in making a persuasive argument to his audience about, in this case, AI’s merits than he is in representing the possibilities of AI according to what the technology is capable of right now. He is also less interested in that representation than in its effects on a family making use of AI in both mundane and extraordinary ways.
In Sheep in the Box, married couple Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto) lost their young son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwai), several years prior to the film’s story. Both of them are still reeling from his death in their own ways. Kensuke performs having made peace with it; Otone seems fairly steeped in mourning. A company named ReBirth offers them something nobody who has buried a loved one is ever given: a chance to see them again. ReBirth blends generative AI and advanced robotics to output doppelgängers of the dead, and Otone and Kensuke, more so the former than the latter, accept the offer of an android Kakeru clone in their house. The reunion is colored by mixed emotions—joy, indifference, diffidence, confusion, anger, extended grief—and that’s not even getting into the matter of how Kakeru makes use of his second life.
I was honored to speak with Koreeda (through his interpreter, Monica) about Sheep in the Box, arguably the most genre-forward film of his career and yet, at the same time, a piece that’s totally in keeping with his gentle, compassionate aesthetic.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
Andy Crump: I wanted to bring up another recent film in which AI plays a central role: Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice (2025). Critics saw it as a critique of AI. Park himself intended it as acceptance: this is what AI is, it is here, it's affecting our world, and these are its consequences. I wonder if Sheep in the Box has a similar meaning for you, as a representation of the fact that AI is a part of our world now.
Hirokazu Koreeda: Just as the refrigerator talks in the film, I think that AI is going to continue to become more and more incorporated into our lives. I think that's an inevitability. But as AI and this technology progresses, I suspect that they will graduate to go beyond just interacting with humans.
AC: The more AI becomes something that interacts with humans and not something that replaces them—which happens in the Park film—I wonder if the more we’ll see its limitations. I think (Sheep in the Box) shows this quite well. AI requires human input to function. It can't imagine on its own. I wonder how we should expect to work with AI, or how it’s supposed to serve us, when it can't imagine anything by itself.
HK: But aren't humans the same? Because children are born, but cannot grow without input from the adults that take care of them. I think that right now, imagination, or the ability to imagine, is what separates humans from AI. That's what I wanted for the beginning of the film, in the scene where the boy can't imagine what's inside the box when he’s read (The Little Prince). That's where that comes from.
But I also think that AI is going to overcome that quite quickly. I don't think I'm trying to depict humans as being special, and I think that if I tried to do that, that would be a mistake. I'm also not depicting AI as some kind of dystopian thing that's going to take over humans. On the flip side, it's also not an abundant future where we can coexist. I actually think that AI will create their own society and live separate from humans, and I think that's more of a realistic progression to what might happen with this technology.
Hirokazu Koreeda
NEON
AC: It makes sense that people would create technology that mirrors the way we are. It’s a blank canvas until information is put into it. Differences aside, that parallel is fascinating. I bring all this up because I feel like (Sheep in the Box) doesn’t have an agenda. You’re simply asking “what if?” You’re channeling Steven Spielberg in this movie. It feels hopeful in a lot of ways. I wondered if that was the greater intention. There’s an optimism here that a lot of movies about AI that are coming out now sorely lack.
HK: I couldn't make films if I were despairing. Empowerment is kind of a trending term in Japan right now. I think in Japan, people often just ask if my films are meant to empower. I would say that I don't make films to empower people, but I also don't make films to make people despair. I certainly don't want people to question whether they should go on living tomorrow, and I don't want people to come out feeling like they should be embarrassed to be human. I want my films to end with an opening for some kind of possibility.
AC: That's how this movie ties into the rest of your work. It’s core to your cinema: wanting to give people a reason to appreciate life. I'm curious how you conceived of (Sheep in the Box). That motif of gentle humanity, even in something like The Third Murder (2018), is very important in your work. For this movie, which is heavily rooted in genre fiction, I'm curious how you kept that throughline.
HK: For me, in order to depict a family drama where a dead family member is brought back to life and reintroduced into that family dynamic, I needed to be able to use the framework of science fiction. So I was never thinking about making a genre film in that respect; it is, first and foremost, a family drama. I'm just using science fiction as a tool to tell that story.
AC: I completely understand: it's a drama that happens to have science fiction elements in it. At the same time, because of the moment that we're in where generative AI is everywhere—it's all people talk about, it's in the news, our movies, our daily lives—I can't help but see the use of science fiction, forward-thinking genre, as having a greater purpose. Science fiction is about the future. Even if you're using it as a tool, at some point, it feels like you're forecasting the future to an extent.
HK: Yeah. I can say that there is a predictive or even prescriptive element to futures as depicted in science fiction films. But taxis still don't fly. I think that a lot of the science fiction films that we've watched have told us lies about what might happen in the future. From my perspective, human life hasn't changed all that much. I'm less interested in showing what a future might look like and more interested in building a vision of the future from inside the home, through depicting the domestic life of a family. I agree that unless we visualize and imagine what a future might look like, we don't have any kind of technological progression. We wouldn't have things like smartphones or planes. But I also think that we get it wrong a lot of the time.
Published on July 30, 2026
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.