“Air Doll” is “a modern fairy tale for adults” and is about a blow-up sex-doll that has a heart (or a soul according to the box). When her buyer is at home, Nozomi acts like a doll, when he is not, she likes to dress herself up and eventually even leaves the house and get a job. The film does not have a whole lot of credibility. When Hideo has his way with her, Nozomi cracks like plastic, but when she has herself treated in a beauty-salon, nobody notices anything and the other way around, Hideo does not notice that Nozomi looks incredibily real. The story that develops is slightly too sweet. Nozomi meets people and in her innocence thinks to learn about the world. Moving like Pinoccio, but dressed in short skirts, Nozomi steals the hearts of but a few. Koreeda uses the doll with a heart to tell us something about the emptiness of modern life, summerised in a beautiful poem that Nozomi learns from an old man (unfortunately I cannot find the poem). The atmosphere is of the very little surrealistic kind and comes accross well sometimes and less good in other scenes. However the film is not boring, I find the 7.1 on IMdB and all the attention for this film is bit overrating.
