Indie(ish) film legend Spike Jonze recently unveiled a new short film, the “robot love story” I’m Here. The project is a so-called creative collaboration with the Absolut vodka brand, and the short film premiered at the 2010 Sundance Festival and screened at the Berlinale before a global online launch.

Following on the heels of Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze seems to be continuing (prolonging?) his adolescent phase with this new piece. The thin plot is essentially a boy-meets-girl story, complicated slightly by the fact that the protagonists are robots (but of course human after all). Apparently a sub-species of robotic beings peacefully coexist in Los Angeles alongside civilians? The only frisson of discontent comes from an old woman who protests that robots can’t drive as our main electro-man is picked up (literally, in her car) by his electro-girl at a bus stop. Perhaps I misread the threadbare clothes, house parties, and downwardly aspirational jobs, but aside from some small quirky touches (they have to plug in at night) these lo-fi robots just seem like, well, hipsters.

Like much of Jonze’s work this film is heavily informed by Los Angeles — from the carpooling, to the yellowing sunsets, to the indie rock luminaries who lend their chops to the soundtrack (Nick Zinner, Aska Matsumiya, and bro Sam Spiegel). What it is NOT heavily informed by is Absolut vodka. I saw only three signs that the brands of vodka and Jonze were tied together: you have to give your age when you enter the site, the use of the Absolut ad font, and the subtitle “a love story in an Absolut world.”

At the IFP Script to Screen conference I attended this weekend (which was great, by the way) the buzzwords were new media and branded content, and the Jonze-Absolut partnership would seem to be a perfect example. But unlike struggling filmmakers who need to attach themselves to a brand to get funding for short content, this is a case of the brand attaching itself to an established director to rebrand themselves in his image. The site puts it bluntly:

“the partnership acknowledges [Absolut's] position as a pioneering and culture-shaping brand.”

Of course I don’t know for sure, but the absolute nonexistence of the brand in the film and a TRT of 30 minutes seem to indicate that Jonze had creative control. Guess it’s actually Spike’s world and they just live in it…