'Robot Dreams' Review: Pablo Berger’s Silent Animated Flick Boots Up a Bittersweet Tale of Friendship | TIFF 2023
NR
Runtime: 1 Hour and 40 Minutes
Country: Spain, France
Production Companies: Arcadia Motion Pictures, Noodles Production, Les Films du Worso, RTVE, Movistar Plus+
Distributor: NEON
Director: Pablo Berger
Writer: Pablo Berger
Release Date: May 31, 2024
In the current animation landscape, it's rare to see a non-Japanese, Chinese, or Irish hand-drawn 2D feature. Walking into Pablo Berger's (Blancanieves, Abracadabra) Robot Dreams during TIFF 2023 with only a still image in mind, I anticipated this Spanish-French co-production to bear the quality of indie projects: motion resembling its storyboarded frames with minimal in-between frame animation while the settings and characters are imperfectly colored.
Oh, how wrong I was.
Based on Sara Varon's graphic novel, an anthropomorphic dog named Dog lives alone in an NYC studio apartment during the ‘80s in an anthropomorphic animal-dominated world. Lonely and depressed, Dog does every activity alone and cannot make new friends. Peeking at other everyday people’s—er, um, animal’s—lives, Dog yearns for companionship. One evening, he sees an ad for a robot buddy on TV, which he quickly orders. Upon package arrival, Dog assembles his new best buddy, and it's love (platonically) at first sight. Immediately inseparable, Dog and Robot share an eventful summer in the city, dancing in Central Park, watching fireworks on the Brooklyn Bridge, and taking boat rides. Their summer sadly goes south during a beach trip that ends with Robot's battery dying, with Dog forced to leave him. After many failed attempts to recover him from the beach, Dog and Robot stay apart through the fall, winter, and spring. Now, the two must find a way to lead a life without each other until they reunite.
Berger's first venture in animation steps onto the same plate as your Cartoon Saloons or ‘90s 2D animated flicks, for Robot Dreams bears a high quality that kept me continuously surprised. Not since Persepolis have I seen a hand-drawn adaptation go beyond the source material's panels and deliver a larger-than-life work of 2D-animated extravagance. Each technical facet, including shadows, expressive lighting, and cleaned-up multicolored backgrounds, captures a former, classic NYC when payphones were on every street corner, and Kim's Video just opened up shop in the East Village.
The art direction by José Luis Ágreda delivers an authentic atmosphere that, even in cartoon form, illustrates New York's beauty and the emotions it elicits, whether loneliness or shared joy. Every wide or establishing shot of the city's busied exteriors shocked me. They’re composed of thin outlines like a syndicated comic panel. Yet, they get every naturalistic nook and cranny of the backgrounds during ample sequences in notable settings like Central Park.
Robot Dreams isn't afraid to go past the urbanized environment, riffing on the culture of the ‘80s setting without pandering. A Halloween set piece revolving around Dog trying to spook off kids dressed as famous horror figures like Freddy Krueger stands out as the best combination of visual gags and worldbuilding. It also homages movies that play a role in the plotting. Early on, the Robot and Dog bond over watching Wizard of Oz, leading to an incredible Wizard of Oz homage/dance number featuring river-dancing flowers, and it's breathtaking. Damien Chazelle could never.
Besides the magnificent animation, Robot Dreams' wordless nature captures the magic of a bygone era in animated storytelling that only Aardman's Shaun the Sheep or Disney+/ independent YouTube shorts offer. Within its emotionally gripping opening minutes, Berger beautifully conveys Dog's loneliness through his big-eyed expressions and humanistic imagery, even if every character is an animal.
Berger's incorporation of well-placed needle drops, specifically Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," is a primary motif of the story's overall message of memory and its poignant observation of friendship.
Even with its devasting moments, Berger integrates well-timed comedy that bridges many bittersweet, vignetted sequences. It boldly trades slapstick—which goes hand in hand with silent animation—with melancholy, ironic humor akin to something from a Peanuts comic, a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, or Alanis Morissette's “Ironic.” I’m a sucker for this brand of humor. I saw much of myself in Dog and his misadventures away from Robot.
Make sure you have a tissue on hand because, holy crap, Robot Dreams’ climax had no reason to go as hard in the feels as it did. No exaggeration, but this might be one of the most adult, bittersweet finales I've witnessed in any movie since Celine Song's Past Lives. Oddly enough, Robot Dreams would make a great double feature with Past Lives, for they are close in their thematic beats regarding a love divided by time and distance.
As refreshing as Robot Dreams is, I would lie to myself if I didn't admit that the premise is stretched too thin during its second half. Some dream sequences, specifically Robot's, are padded out longer than they should. I will not go that extra mile and say, "Oh, this would've worked better as a short," because there hasn't been an animated movie as unique as this in ages. Not by a long shot. The 100-minute runtime, while ambitious, would benefit from a tight 15-minute cut out of it.
Poetic, lyrical, and nostalgic in both its setting and animation storytelling, Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams is an incredible cinematic experience with a rich examination of friendship, told maturely and sincerely. It's one of the year's most human movies, and there's not even a single human in the film.
