In the 1970s, Kubrick purchased the rights to Brian Aldiss’ short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” a Pinocchio-like tale about an android boy in an overpopulated future. After three decades failing to realize the project, Kubrick offered it to Steven Spielberg, who jumped at the opportunity and produced one of his most ambitious, emotionally complex science-fiction films. Kubrick’s biggest obstacle was creating a convincing android boy through available special effects technology, a problem Spielberg solved by casting Haley Joel Osment as the robot and directing him into a state of placid wonder that lands just to the side of uncanny. Working with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to cast the film in a fairy tale glow, Spielberg creates a future society teetering between devastating loneliness and dog-eat-dog lunacy, where the bittersweet path in the middle is made possible only by a complicated manipulation of audience sympathies between man and machine.