Robotopia 1990

Directed by George Haggerty

Robotopia uses the same blend of magic realism and poetic journalism to unpick contemporary Japanese culture. Post-war Japan is viewed as a vortex that sucks in imagery, ideas and applications from all over the world and somehow translates them into diverting artefacts. For a country that never had an industrial revolution, Japan has a unique relationship to robots. Haggerty's investigation of the how and why of this phenomenon bravely slides us up and down the interface between humans behaving like robots and machine robots behaving like humans.