Spike Jonze's I'M HERE - A LOVE STORY

The first time I saw Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, I knew that I had experienced something special and extraordinary. A flawlessly executed peek into the confusing, emotional, and sometimes devastating world of a 9-year-old boy captured by a 30-year-old artist/filmmaker who never lost his vivid imagination. With I'm Here - A Love Story, Jonze has traded in the theme of "bewildering childhood" for "confusing first love." And he has managed once again to create something singular and revelatory.

The scientific formula for I'm Here could be represented as: (500) Days of Summer + Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree ÷ I, Robot. Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory play robots living "ordinary" lives in Los Angeles until a chance encounter brings them together and they experience the rushes of creativity, fantasy, sacrifice, and, after all, love. Basic? Yes. Obvious? Not even for a second.

Some may pass off I'm Here as contrived or disingenuous because of the short-film's style. However, to be blunt, I would call those people cynics. Jonze has created immediately identifiable protagonists and a coy yet assured vision of love. In 30 too-short minutes, I was reminded that love truly is everything it is made out to be - the beautiful and the tragic - and is worth risking all you have for. There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in the film when, at a party, our two robo-mantic leads catch sight of one another from separate ends of a room. Smoothly, they lock eyes, remain in their spots, and simply bask in that moment when the world goes fuzzy all around you, if only for a split second, and you know wholly that you are not alone. That you belong to someone who gets you and wants you unchanged. That kind of love shares the same qualities as this kind of film: strange and wonderful.