ROBOT DREAMS - Mark Reviews Movies

Robot Dreams, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 30, 2024

Robot Dreams is set in a New York City of the 1980s, filled with familiar sights and sounds of the past. It's also a world populated by anthropomorphized animals and gradually being filled with sentient robots, capable of cooking, cleaning, playing sports, and all sorts of things. One of those other tasks is being a friend, and Dog, the main character of this sweet and funny film, desperately wants one.

The film, written and directed Pablo Berger, is a small delight of style, comedy, and sentimentality. It's presented as an old-fashioned cartoon, with its eclectic cast of strange-looking but recognizable animals and an episodic structure that means each scene almost stands on its own as a complete bit of storytelling. It's also inherently sad and lonely, as the canine protagonist deals with isolation, finding a friend, and losing his best pal, while the robot finds itself stuck in a situation so helpless that even its dreams only solidify how alone it is.

This may not sound cheery or even much fun. However, the trick of Berger's adaptation of Sara Varon's graphic novel is the juxtaposition of that gloomy state with the film's bright, colorful animation, its flashes of visual invention, and the way it finds little moments of comedy in between its bigger gags and its underlying mood of nearly absolute loneliness. If this story were about people, we'd probably be in tears, but one of the great benefits of animation is that it can create its own world and sense of logic, both of the physical and emotional varieties.

Yes, then, it's rather despairing to see poor Dog sitting by himself in his apartment, playing a two-player video game on his own, microwaving a TV dinner, and staring at the reflective screen of powered-down tube television. The reflection shows him, but it also makes the space on the couch next to him clear. When an ad for a friendship robot comes on while Dog is flipping channels, he orders one immediately.

Of some note is that Berger tells this story without any dialogue. Dog and Robot, who arrives via mail shortly after, are technically voiced by Ivan Labanda, but that voicing amounts to all grunts and sighs from the dog, while the robot usually finds itself whistling a particularly catchy tune about a specific day in September. The characterization here, both of the leads and the assorted other animals who come across the pair's united and separate paths over the course of the tale, is mostly in physicality.

Dog has a habit of wagging his tail whenever he's happy, such as when Robot takes his hand while the duo walk through Central Park on one of the few days they have together. Well, the tail starts wagging after the pain of a metal hand controlled by a robot that doesn't recognize its own strength subsists, but the point remains. The film leaves open the possibility that the bond between Dog and Robot might be more than just a friendship, but then again, Dog does go on a couple of dates later with a sporty female duck. Then again another time around, a dog who considers a romantic relationship with a duck might not look past something developing with a kind-hearted, gender-neutral robot, either.

All of this is mostly beside the point, of course, because Dog and Robot grow close, spend a lot of time out and about in the city, and, without knowing it, have one final day together at the beach. The combination of water, sand, and lying in the sun all day does something to Robot's mechanical insides, leaving it unable to move and Dog unable to move his best friend. Dog returns to his apartment to gather some tools, but upon returning the next day, the beach is closed until next summer. A tall fence and a bull security guard ensure he can't get to Robot.

From there, Dog goes about his life, trying to make the best of things, going on little adventures to look for new friends, and waiting for the seasons to change so he can retrieve the robot. Some holiday and weather changes come and go, as Dog tries to scare some trick-or-treaters, takes a disastrous ski trip to the Catskills (which is apparently run by actual cats if the advertising is accurate), and, yes, has those dates with the duck. She gets him to have some fun while being active for once, and obviously, the rest of the story pretty much lets us know that won't last long. There is a good bit involving Dog's guilt over catching a fish to be had before the melancholy arrives.

For its part, Robot can't do anything but lie on the beach and wait. Its adventures are mostly in its mind, and that allows Berger to play around with expectations and this world. One dream has Robot falling through the bottom of the frame of the film itself, turning the entire thing to reveal New York as a fantasy realm, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center rise in emerald green into the vast sky. Ultimately, there's some indirect cruelty to this, as well as some direct examples from a rowing crew that springs a leak and the owner of a scrapyard who has no use for a robot, but then, there's a lovely section in which Robot provides shelter and silent encouragement to a mother bird and her chicks.

The fanciful world of Robot Dreams is convincing and thoroughly amusing. The bittersweet tone of friendship gained, lost, and, despite everything that happens, never forgotten gives the material an unexpected emotional heft.

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