Mechanical Love

My first film that I saw at the Full Frame Film Festival, and currently my favorite, Mechanical Love is an ambient film from director Phie Ambo about the humanization of mechanical objects. We follow two dual narratives: Hiroshi Ishiguro, an inventor working to create a most realistic robotic version of himself and his family, and Frau Körner, a nursing home patient who receives a theraputic robotic seal named Paro. In these two narratives, we see the drastic differences in human reactions and emotions to robotics.

I absolutely adored the tone with which the director approaches the material. The camera is simply an observer, watching the humans in the film interact with the robots. We notice their facial expressions, their body language, and it's more telling than anything they reveal to us through spoken word. In a particularly telling scene, Frau Körner has her Paro taken away after it becomes too distracting during choir practice. Almost instantaneously, the happiness shown by her throughout the film is gone. She sits quietly through the practice with a sullen look, eagerly awaiting the moment she can spend time with her Paro again. Once she picks up the robot, she nurtures it as if it genuinely missed the time it was gone from her. Although she says nothing during this, it's what she doesn't say that's most important. With Ishiguro, the director takes the same approach. Letting Ishiguro babble on with long-winded dialogue about his endeavor, Ambo allows Ishiguro to reveal his detachment from humanity. Ishiguro jokes, somewhat seriously, about how he wishes his robot could be realistic enough that it could replace his mundane duties at his house where he's "required" to spend time with his family. In a later scene, his wife admits that she would prefer the robot to her husband provided it operated well enough. This quiet, observing camera is accompanied by a barely audible ambient soundtrack. Like these two characters and their relationship to humanity, it is detached, only floating in every few minutes with a few electronic notes, reminding is it's there.

In Ishiguro's vision, we see how having a goal of complete realism can impede the emotional attachment that humans can place on robots. Ishiguro's Gemenoid (as he calls it) is incredibly realistic in it's movement, frighteningly so, and his daughter reveals this by her refusal to interact with it during Ishiguro's test run. He's confused, a testament to his loss of his own connection to his family and by extension humanity while on his obsessive quest. The reason for his lack of success is demonstrated through the Paro narrative. The designer of the Paro, Takanori Shibata, is shown speaking at a conference of his successes and failures when designing the Paro. He originally designed a realistic cat, but it was a commercial failure. Users, already familiar with the actions of a cat, had too many expectations of the robot. They wanted realistic cat behavior and were disappointed when the robot couldn't deliver. Shibata took his design in a new direction, and he created a robot creature that one couldn't have any expectations for: a seal. Since users were unfamiliar with it's behavior, they didn't have any expectations, and were then only seeing the present interactivity of the robot. This was Ishiguro's failure. His Gemenoid was, in fact, too human-looking but not human-acting enough. It was so realistic looking that when it's actions didn't deliver it simply became an uncanny and horrifying likeness of Ishiguro. The Paro, with it's generic movement and vague squeaks, allowed the user to project their own emotions upon the robot. When the Paro is squealing, is it doing it with delight? Is it hungry? Is it yearning for the warmth of it's mother? It's whatever Frau Körner wanted. She pet the robot as it squealed, giving it all the genuine love she had to give. This open-ended action allows the user to identify with Paro in their own way, and this is how it became much more human than the Gemenoid would ever be. It's the reason we all love R2-D2.