It was a stroke of genius for Spanish director Pablo Berger to adapt Sara Varon’s 2007 book, Robot Dreams — the story of a dog and its pet robot in mid-1980s New York — as a hand-drawn animated fable. The film, which was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar earlier this year, could just as easily have been made with computer graphics, the dominant style of most mainstream animation nowadays; indeed, at some point, that was reportedly the plan. But computer animation would have grounded the movie in something closer to the real world.
And that would have been catastrophic. In Robot Dreams , the bold clarity of the line drawings matches the clean simplicity of the plot — which, perhaps ironically, fires our imaginations even further. The movie’s entrancing and melancholy beauty feels old-fashioned in a contemporary animation world largely defined by clutter and smarm.
With zero dialogue, the film follows a lonely dog (known simply as Dog) who purchases a robot companion by mail. Dog assembles Robot, and the two of them proceed to spend a wonderful summer in the overcrowded, sweaty city. (The whole world is populated by animals; there are no people here, as far as I can tell.
) One day, they take a bus way out to the beach and cavort joyfully in the waves. Afterward, however, Robot breaks down and can’t move its limbs. After anxiously trying to move this large metal hulk, Dog leaves for home to figure out how to fix the problem.
But the beach is now closed an.
