It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Ever since I saw Doona Bae in "Cloud Atlas" I have been fascinated by her unconventional beauty and have been checking out her earlier work in Japan and Korea. I have not been disappointed. I particularly liked "Linda Linda Linda". She is finally being noticed in the US and I am glad to see she will be in the Wachowskis next film "Jupiter Ascending" Although the concept of "Air Doll" might be off putting to some, if you give the film a chance to develop, you will see that it is handled tastefully and is far from perverse. It is beautifully filmed and well acted both lighthearted at times and quite dark at others.Doona Bae excels as the wide eyed innocent, wandering around Tokyo and discovering the world, for the first time.Air Doll has a lovely emotional musical score from "Worlds End Girlfriend" perfectly fits the movie. The main criticism, I am getting from critics, is that the film is too long. (about 2 hours). I myself, never felt bored. And at the end was quite misty eyed. As long as you are able to suspend belief in the concept, the film works. I would give it many thumbs up. A breathtakingly beautiful film.Doona Bae is a magnificent actress. Air Doll is her masterpiece. I have watched it many times and it always gets better. A truly unique film.

Having read nothing but good things about this movie, I decided to add it to my movie collection, so I purchased it from Amazon. And it was with a high amount of expectation that I sat down to watch the movie.And now that I have seen it, I sit here with a somewhat disappointing taste in my mouth. The movie was not really all that great as it was hyped up to be. At least not in my opinion.The story is about Nozomi, a blow-up sex doll, who comes to life and starts exploring the world taking in every single experience for the first time.I will say that the storyline was interesting, but it just left too many plot holes open and it also had too many things going on where you would wonder just how would that come to be or why wouldn't anyone notice that something fishy was going on. In overall, then the storyline tried to accomplish a bit too much compared to what it delivered.What made the movie work for me, at least, was the images and the cinematography. The movie was really beautifully shot, and it was quite dynamic. There are some really nice shots in the movie.As for the acting, well they had some good enough people on the cast list, but I wouldn't really say that there was anything outstanding here. Good performances all around.On a different note, then the movie does come off as interesting in the sense that some people actually do have these 'real dolls' and treat them as actual people. Which, to me, is just hilarious, and the movie does tackle this strange phenomena in a nice enough manner."Air Doll" has a semi-fun story to tell, but it is the type of movie that you watch once, and don't pick it up again at a later time, because the movie just doesn't have that much to offer.

Youth culture today is much like it was several generations ago in the early 20th century with one significant difference. We live in a more sexually relaxed society today, which is ironically less promiscuous than it was for young adults in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Indeed, a higher percentage of children today reach their 19th and even 20th birthdays with their virginity than their parents did. It isn't uncommon, if you speak to this minority of young people, to hear outlandish, fantastical, or absurd descriptions of their ideal boyfriend/girlfriend or first sexual encounter. Childhood exposure to "sweet romance" films linger unhealthily and sabotage these older virgins. This is especially true in Japan, where depopulation is a serious social issue.Hirokazu Koreeda's Air Doll is a film about this phenomenon, or I interpret it as one. Unfortunately, any review you read is going to be jaded by the film's abyss of ambiguity. A few of the director's intentions are identifiable, but a lot of it features the titular doll wandering about and experiencing her new human life. These segments are well-filmed and emotionally grounded in a generic childhood discovery theme, lacking the more interesting focal points of the director's other films. The viewer is thus left to apply cultural implications to the film for it to be more than pure cinema.The air doll is an inflatable sex toy owned by a middle-aged man who calls her Nozomi and treats her as his girlfriend. They eat dinner together, walk through the park, and have sex all on his schedule, and he loves her a lot. Nozomi "realizes (she) has a heart" and wakes up one day when her master goes to work. She wanders around for a while, taking everything in, and visits a movie store. She begins working there and falls in love with one of her coworkers. More wonder sequences play, this time featuring the pair's almost-dialog free courtship. On paper it sounds mundane, but lead actress Bae Doona bolsters the emotionality of these scenes with her performance which is reminiscent of a Disney Princess role minus the artificial sentiment. The camera frequently grants us a close ups of her and her boyfriend, encouraging our intimacy with their romance.Koreeda overtly references Disney's version of The Little Mermaid, specifically in Nozomi's observation of a girl who mistakes a fork for a comb. The girl's father tells her that a fork isn't for grooming, which becomes entwined with the narrative when Nozomi punctures herself. Her boyfriend "blows life into her" through her air hole, an indirect form of sexual expression, but Nozomi doesn't understand its implications. This reaffirms the latent misogyny of the many Disney films, where the woman character subtly confuses her psychological needs with those of society and her prince. A perfect conclusion follows: Nozomi stabs her boyfriend in his navel to breathe into him, and he bleeds to death. Her desire for mutual intimacy cannot be realized, and she suffers for it. In her grief, she throws herself in a trash heap.Perhaps Air Doll can thus be seen as an encompassing metaphor for coming social collapse brought about by youth's (Japanese or otherwise) alienation from itself. Beyond the birth rate decline, people are more likely to encourage their perversions when they are entirely alone. Watching contrived romantic films only worsens an already vulnerable populace's efforts to get what it wants, at some level.Recommended

Writer-director Kore-eda has a strong fanbase in Singapore after his well-received Nobody Knows garnered him quite the following from a screening here years back. No sooner than the festival's tickets had gone on sale that it registered its first sell-out session in Air Doll, and two other subsequent repeat screenings released had all its tickets already snapped up. Either that, or the appeal of watching a sex doll come to life under Singapore's R21 rating uncut is too hard to pass up. I had that opportunity to partake in a masterclass session with Kore-eda during last year's Tokyo International Film Festival where three of his films got screened overnight with the director and his guests in attendance, but alas I wasn't in top form to have covered it. I'm regretting it now.The other film I had watched with a sex doll featured prominently in the story was Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl starring Ryan Gosling, where his character bought a custom made sex doll over the internet not for sex, but for companionship. Personally I've always thought it creepy for anyone to own a doll to interact with and yikes, to make love to, and here even christening it Nozomi. But as a character in Air Doll puts it, a real life relationship may be too hard for some folks to handle because it comes with inevitable problems, warts and all. And yes while that's the truth, I still can't fathom the necessity of owning a doll for sexual gratification, but I digress.Kore-da's Air Doll is a fantasy film along the lines of Pinnochio, where an inanimate object comes to life and dreams of being a real boy. Here, it's all the more creepier when the air doll Nozomi suddenly without reason nor forewarning, starts to move on her own, and develops heart and soul through the course of the story. She doesn't need to yearn to be real, because she's almost real, utilizing clothing and makeup to conceal portions of her that are tell-tale signs that she's a life-sized made-of-plastic Barbie doll coming in the form of Korean actress Bae Doo-na (last seen in the Korean monster film The Host). Bae brings her Nozomi a sense of that wide-eyed wonderment of the real world, and her performance as a plastic inflatable doll is flawless, with Nozomi constantly in amazement from the assault of the senses of sight, sound and touch. There's also a comedic innocence brought about through her zilch knowledge of the real world, which of course we'll expect this to be exploited by nastier humans, because the world is as evil as such, where innocence has no place once her honeymoon period is over. Balancing her routine very carefully with that of her owner Hideo's (Itsuji Itao) in order to enable her to work at a video store in the day, living an independent life undetected, and then being back at home on time to fulfill Hideo's sexual needs, things start to become a little more complicated when she develops feelings for her colleague Junichi (Arata).Paced slowly to mirror Nozomi's journey of discovery of all things beautiful, from cosmetics to toddlers to that proverbial flower along the sidewalk, Air Doll contains a few scenes that provide that stark commentary about the emptiness of soul and the loneliness experienced in big city living. To Nozomi it's an abstract concept that she grasps only literally, but for the rest of us, we're likely to nod in agreement with the statements, since we're experiencing such feelings day in and day out. It is these episodes and incidents, through Nozomi's interactions with others that bring the film to life, and some of these can be as short as one self-contained scene like the one on the bus where she lends her shoulder to a sleeping man. It's all within our means to show a little compassion and to make the world a better place to live in.While yet consumed with a pop kind of feeling throughout, and Kore-eda's most erotic film to date, the film is a meditation of life, and the fragility of it, where people are constantly in search of substitutes for things they cannot obtain to fulfill some need or want, which reflects quite well of our modern life where distractions are many, and substitution being a way of life from products to services. I absolutely loved how Kore-eda provided us scenes of satisfaction with a montage of lonely people doing simple things, to that switch later on with dissatisfaction with the same. It's a wonderful fantasy film that makes us reflect on our own parallels, but doesn't do so in a preachy way, instead relying on tragedy and especially comedy through the literal interpretation of things, to lighten the mood. The science-fiction equivalent will be something like Spielberg's A.I., where a young robot embarks on a quest to find his mother and become a real boy This air doll has plenty of humanity inside her, full of soul and that never-ceasing innocent curiosity that makes it a delight to watch, maintaining touching aspects to tug at your heartstrings. I'm quite certain the audience who have snapped up tickets so eagerly won't be left disappointed.