Usually machines become sentient only after their human makers have given them bodies (we’re looking at you Cylons), but in the new short film HENRi, the awareness comes first, then the arms and legs.

A Kickstarter-funded short film by director Eli Sasich that also stars Superman’s Margot Kidder, HENRi is about a research spaceship that has fallen into disrepair, becoming self-aware and building a body from scrap pieces of itself to feel more human. (All together now, “Awwww…”) It may sound like the softer side of sci-fi but Sasich’s film is also a very dark observation about what it would be like to be lost in space and born of a love of classic science fiction.

“HENRi was born out of my love for the sci-fi films of the ’70s and ’80s, as well as the classic novels of Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov,” Sasich said in an e-mail to Wired. “Ultimately, I wanted to tell a very human story, which happens to feature a robot as the main character. That challenge excited me.”

If it sounds a little bit like 2001: The Later Years, then here’s the real twist: HENRi, the ship/body, is voiced Dr. Dave Bowman himself, Keir Dullea. “I guess you could say the character of HENRi was a sane version of HAL,” Dullea says in a making-of video for the film. The filmmaking itself also has flavors of both the new and the old — bringing together live-action sequences with puppetry, scenes shot with quarter-scale miniatures and other aspects done through modern CGI.

“The goal was to seamlessly integrate these different techniques to create the world,” Sasich said. “My philosophy is that effects are merely a tool to help the story, and that in mind, we used pretty much every trick in the book.”

Check out an exclusive clip of HENRi walking for the first time in the clip above. The film, which screened at the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, is now available on download and Blu-ray/DVD. Find out more here.