I love Miyubi
Robots were hella cool in the 80’s. At some point I had a very memorable robot, an Armatron…

Ugh. I really didn’t remember it was made my Radio Shack, but here we are. My friend Ben W. had the Nintendo R.O.B. I was super jealous.

ROB did something with discs in some dumb Nintendo game, I dunno. I didn’t care, I was jealous. Either way I wanted something better. I wanted the Omnibot, I think…it took cassette tapes.

When I didn’t get that from my parents, I settled for a Teddy Ruxpin, which my parents ALSO wouldn’t buy me.
So, no robots for me. Other than the stupid RadioShack Arm thing. I had as much fun as you could by picking various objects up. OK fine, it was super fun.
30 years later we have Miyubi.
I’ve been appreciating VR for a while now, and 360 video (especially the 3D kind) is really interesting. The Mr. Robot Virtual Reality Experience is the perfect example of when 360 video was creeping out from novelty to storytelling. I talk about it very highly here.
Given my childhood history with robots and my current fascination with VR and 360 video, Miyubi hits a sweet spot. I might have been expecting too much in retrospect. In fact, even given my expectations, it over-delivered.
Miyubi is the story, from a toy robot’s perspective, of a family who gives their boy a toy robot for his birthday. From a technology perspective, it’s an exceptionally advanced robot — it understands basic voice prompts and offers limited speech responses. It also responds to basic commands.
Each scene is a video file/memory dump of what the robot sees until its battery ultimately runs out or its powered off. My link for Miyubi above is a Wired article talking about the nostalgia factor….and believe me, it was immense. So many toys. When you are the size of a robot on a kid’s floor and staring at Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain…yes, I’ll admit…amazing. So many toys…but I’ll digress to the technical aspects.
Being “baked” as I would call it, 360 video can’t perform some technical feats. Miyubi, being an Oculus Rift application, can go a bit beyond. One aspect of being the robot, is that I can look up and see the Miyubi chyron at the top of my vision. More importantly, I can look down and see my 80’s robot body at any point in this 40 minute video.
My absolute faaaaavorite scene was the John Rambo scene. The father of the family says his goodbyes to his son on his all too often Japan business trip dressed as Rambo. The scene is comprised of him recording his farewell via a very 80’s camcorder hooked up to a cathode ray tube TV. The absolute amazing attention to detail here was that when I (the robot) looked over at the TV screen, I could watch my robot head follow my own head movements.
Despite being a “Funny or Die” branded video, the Rambo scene encapsulated both the hilarity and the sadness of a father spending too little time with his family. If I watched this on a traditional TV, it wouldn’t have nearly the impact because, honestly, it’s really not that sad. As a VR experience, you just feel it more.
Case in point the children. I don’t have children, so it’s always a unique experience when I visit friends who do. Just this past weekend, my wife and I visited friends who have little ones. As we pulled up in their drive, a 7 year old decided to get right in the car and get her face inches from mine and just gab at me.
Weird.
But guess what? Christmas morning with two kids, or a classroom of screaming 1st graders with you as a robot properly emulates this experience.
Miyubi is the first feature length VR film I’ve experienced, and it captures sadness, 80's nostalgia, uncomfortableness (OMG the weed scene when the teen freaks out and wants to destroy robots), and hilarity. I should really emphasize hilarity, because the comedy is truly tailored to VR. The discomfort of some of the family situations alone is gold, but the grandpa of the family subtly turning to you to talk about Iwo Jima and potatoes had me in tears. I don’t believe any of this would play on a screen because it’s too subtle, but in VR its freaking amazing.
Basically, Miyubi establishes new rules for VR comedy. There’s so much to digest, and I think playing it subtle as they did creates an extreme tension which explodes in your mind as hilarity. Because it’s “Funny or Die”, I have to believe that that’s all they set out to do, but honestly, there’s some real emotion here, and I don’t think they intended it from the get go. The piece just feels so real, I got attached to this family, and I got attached to the robot. I saw the end coming a million miles away, but yah, it hurt my feelings.
Please give these people an Emmy or an Oscar. Whatever. And if the director is listening? Please print up some Miyubi stickers, t-shirt, or action figure. I really want ALL of these.
