One-man-show AI filmmaker Hooroo Jackson is back with an all-new adventure, My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?. We first encountered his work in Window Seat, then DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, and most recently, A Very Long Carriage Ride. Watch all three films, and you’ll get a bird’s-eye view of how AI animation has evolved over the last three or four years. With this feature, the writer-director delivers his first fully AI-generated 3D-animated feature and ups the stakes by allowing you to “choose your own protagonist.” This means you can choose whether your lead character is black or white. Same lines, same action, different person — all providing a bit of unexpected nuance to the tale.
Whichever protagonist you choose, the story is about industrious secretary Abigail, who was recently hired by the mysterious executive Mark to be his personal assistant. Instantly, Abigail notices something odd about Mark and becomes obsessed with an old superhero/spy television show called The Eagle. The show’s hero eerily resembles Mark, and the antagonist is an acquaintance of Abigail’s, Regis, who appeared for only a few episodes, yet whose real-life seems to parallel the character. As Abigail begins to uncover Mark’s true identity and resists the urge to hook up with him, we’re taken through corporate intrigue, espionage, and a race to expose an evil algorithm powerful enough to take over the world.
“…Abigail notices something odd about Mark and becomes obsessed with an old superhero/spy television show…”
Jackson’s inspiration for My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? was about more than advancing the medium of AI storytelling. Instead, he wanted to give audiences a meaningful choice by letting them select their protagonist. The idea came from the discourse surrounding Disney’s “Black” Little Mermaid. Abigail A and Abigail B share the same dialogue, blocking, and plot, but are portrayed as two different women. In his Substack essay, he argues the experiment proves that context changes meaning. Identical scenes can feel different because power dynamics, social history, and “the oxygen in the room” shift depending on who Abigail is in that space — boardrooms, flirtations, interruptions — all landing with different weight even when the script doesn’t change.
Does the experiment work? I think so, but it’s incredibly subtle. They’re two different characters saying the same lines, but weirdly, it just feels different. I also think it would feel different if Abigail were in a wheelchair or overweight. I may not be a sociologist, but the experiment in perception has me intrigued.
"…worth seeing to understand where we're at in the medium and the potential for the future."
