SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen this film and don’t want certain aspects of it spoiled for you, I highly recommend you watch it for yourself before reading this! But if you don’t mind…

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a Steven Spielberg film that I fell in love with growing up. It follows the adventures of a robotic boy named David as he tries to become a real boy, like a futuristic, android version of Pinnochio. This movie never fails to make me cry in the end, so when tasked with creating an alternate movie poster concept for the film as a school project, I knew I wanted to choose a moment that would communicate both the profoundness and the emotion of the story to illustrate. The moment I depicted is right after David finds out that he is not quite the unique individual he though he was and other robotic models of him are widely manufactured and distributed to the world. He stands on top of the Chrysler Building (and in this future, New York city is mostly underwater) surrounded by the Art Deco architecture, processing his emotions and contemplating his existence, as much as a robot made in the image of a child can at least. I also wanted to highlight the statue behind him in the piece which was something David had been chasing through most of the movie, a vague memory of ‘a bird’ that held the key to his identity and the supposed answer to all his problems.

Media: Digital- Procreate