[watch this video] Kara

[unjapanologist]

Social experiment: please watch the video before reading any of the text that follows it? There seems to be wide agreement that this is a moving and poignant short, but I'm curious to know exactly why different people find it poignant, so I don't want to impose my framing of what happens beforehand.

Kara (7min)

"Kara" is intended to show off the motion capture technology that will be used for some future games on the PS3. Reading the full article only after I'd watched the video, it struck me how my reaction to it was different from that of Cory Doctorow, whose introduction to the vid on Boing Boing was the only text I read before moving on to the video. He writes that "the unsettling poignancy of this clip arises from the gender and form of the robot". In the comments to that article (which are somewhat iffy in places), lots of people pipe up with where they think the poignancy came from, citing everything from the robot's appearance to her human-like reactions to the music. There's more interpretations in the comments on YouTube (which are iffier).

I found this moving as well, but I'm fairly sure that the "gender and form of the robot" had very little to do with my reaction. For me, this video was all about the story of Kara and the assembly worker, their interactions, and their relationship. Kara is certainly impressively human-like, the acting is good, the music helps, and so on, but all that just works to support what is essentially - for me - a character piece. Some Boing Boing commenters felt the story would have been stronger if the whole thing had been deliberate, a test to see if the robot was self-aware enough. While that might have been interesting, it's not my preferred interpretation, because it would interfere with my reading of this as two characters interacting. If it was all a set-up and the assembly worker's reactions were routine and fake, something he does twenty times a day with every robot he tests, that would mean these two characters didn't really connect. I want there to be shippiness everywhere, darn it.

Comments

[foxinthestars]

I did get misty, but for the poignancy, at some point I began to feel that it was because the writer was shamelessly playing me. Creating us this helpless innocent (and the sympathetic feel of innocent wonder does come through in the movements and reactions), threatening to kill her, and then rescuing her after all is a pretty basic way to emotionally manipulate your audience. I half suspect that her gendered form followed from that scenario rather than being responsible in itself; I think it would have been equally poignant (although with a somewhat different feel) had the android been male, but it's further from some cultural comfort zone to cast a male as the damsel. The fact that the operator changes his mind and puts her back together without saying anything about it for some time maybe reinforces the feeling that "okay, now they're giving me this sense of relief without wanting to resolve the tension just yet."

[unjapanologist]

Yeah, it's manipulative, of course. It's definitely an over-the-top "Watch this cute puppy play! Oh no, someone wants to drown it! Will the puppy make it!?" sort of video.

it's further from some cultural comfort zone to cast a male as the damsel

True. I think it would have had a much stronger effect on me if the robot had been a young man, actually, because when a female anything appears, I'm used to expecting the character will be put in danger at some point. It's kind of a given for female characters. A male character, in a position of complete helplessness where all they can do to save themselves is beg and appeal to someone else's compassion... That would have been a lot more striking.