E.I: Emotional Intelligence
2016 · 8m · South Korea
Directed by Dennis Sungmin Kim
Genres: animation, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Arthur, a robot designed with Emotional Intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, encounters a female EI who shows him romantic love and a path out of the mundane factory life that defines them. A hand-drawn meditation on consciousness, connection, and what it means to be alive.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's waiting for the robot-love-story to hit some profound note about consciousness, and Kim mostly delivers what you'd expect—beautiful but safe, a competent WALL-E riff that doesn't quite have the teeth to genuinely unsettle you.
A formally assured meditation on sentience and longing, where the hand-drawn aesthetic deliberately situates itself against the lineage of experimental animation and science fiction cinema, executing its emotional restraint with considerable discipline.
That ten-month hand-drawn commitment—the decision to refuse digital shortcuts and instead let every frame breathe with analog imperfection—is what transforms this from a clever premise into something that actually *feels* like consciousness waking up; the texture becomes the argument.
Reviews
A gorgeously-animated, experimental meditation on existential questions exploring the significance of love.
The animation is breathtakingly gorgeous, and the story, which follows two robots who experience deep and human-like love as their world threatens to crumble around them, is poignant in all of the right ways.
Festivals
- National Film Festival for Talented Youth 2017, Audience Award (2x)
- National Film Festival for Talented Youth 2016
- Mill Valley Film Festival 2015
- Orlando Film Festival 2015
- Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival 2020, Youth Track Winner