n , the simplest things can have the biggest impact: the jaunty swish of a dog’s pointed tail, a day-at-the-beach scene rendered in jellybean colors, the way a snowflake drifting from the sky awakens a sleeping beauty, –style. Spanish director Pablo Berger’s gorgeous —adapted from a graphic novel by Sara Varon—is the sum of details like that, and the result is so joyously, casually poetic that you barely feel prepared for the story’s deeply affecting ending. But that ending is what makes sing.
This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making. set in 1980s New York, opens in a classic East Village apartment, where a solitary dog named Dog slumps on his sofa watching TV and playing video games. When he turns off the tube, he sees his lonely reflection in the screen; it’s too much to bear.
Then he sees an ad for a robot he can order by mail. Why not? Minutes later, ACME-style, the mail truck drops off the box, and Dog gets to work assembling his new robot friend, who, after a few false starts in the setup process, bleeps to life before his eyes. Robot and Dog head out to explore the streets of New York, a world of pay phones, of subway tokens sold in 10-packs, of little metal boxes that will dispense a newspaper for a few coins.
This now-vanished world is their playground, a universe of grubby wonders; though Dog has seen it all before, he experiences it anew through Robot, who’s de.