“It’s pure cinema,” Guillermo del Toro tells me via email, “affecting and gorgeous, and because it’s animation, it is absolutely a creation and not a re-creation.” The revered Mexican director and staunch champion of animation is raving about “Robot Dreams,” a hand-drawn urban fable that received a surprise Oscar nomination earlier this year. Del Toro won that Academy Award in 2023 for his heart-rending, World War II-set “Pinocchio,” co-directed with the late Mark Gustafson .
Without a single line of spoken dialogue, “Robot Dreams,” out in Los Angeles on Friday, tracks a stirring friendship from its sunny dawn to a bittersweet twilight. Feeling the weight of loneliness, Dog, a pudgy canine living in a kinetic and chaotic 1980s New York, purchases a robot friend from a late-night infomercial. Together, the fast pals frolic around the city until one fateful day Robot gets stranded at Coney Island at the end of summer.
With the beach closed for the season, Dog spends the next few months trying to break in to rescue him, while Robot dreams fantastically of getting back to his buddy. Del Toro describes the film as “a very deep, very human story about love and loss and life after that. Adult, emotionally, but delightful and whimsical, visually and tonally.
” The movie’s Spanish writer-director, Pablo Berger, making his first foray into animation, reimagined the friendship from a 2007 graphic novel by American artist Sara Varon . “I never thought I wou.
