Watch it and weep

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This article was published 22/08/2024 (449 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sweetly, deceptively simple, this affecting all-ages animated film speaks to the boon of friendship without saying a word.

Dialogue-free but not silent, Robot Dreams grooves to the soundtrack of a big city. Its old-school hand-drawn cartooning is clear and straightforward but packed with little details. The layered narrative shades from goofy fun to yearning bittersweetness.

Kids will pick up more on the gentle humour, while grown-ups might get a bit teary about the film’s understated evocations of time and change, memory and loss.

Adapted from a 2007 graphic novel by Sara Varon, the story starts with a lonely dog living in the East Village in 1980s New York City.

After another stay-at-home evening featuring a cheerless microwave dinner and late-night infomercials, Dog sends away for an “Amica 2000” and builds a robot friend.

Soon Dog and Robot are getting out there and doing fun stuff together, which is relayed in an exuberantly silly and blessedly unhurried montage. The friends boat in Central Park. They roller-skate to an Earth, Wind & Fire song. They go to the top of the Empire State Building. They eat hotdogs. They watch buskers in the subway.

On one perfect late summer day, they head to the Playland amusement park on the Jersey Shore. Through a series of unfortunate events, they get separated.

At this point, the story takes a poignant turn: we wonder whether they will find each other again and how each will get by in the meantime.

There’s a lot of melancholy longing here, but the film’s overall tone is optimistic and affirming. Dog and Robot form other relationships, they have other experiences. They often think of each other in sequences that are a fluid mix of dreams, memories and hopes.

Spanish director Pablo Berger (Blancanieves) uses clean-lined animation that combines anthropomorphic animal characters — BoJack Horseman-style — with realistic backgrounds that call up the look and feel of 1980s NYC. There are crowded streets of used bookstores and pawn shops and laundromats. The Twin Towers are often seen in the distance, their presence a constant reminder of what will be their traumatic loss.

There are television screens emblazoned with the MTV logo. There’s the very particular sound of early videogames (“pok … pok”). There’s a throwaway visual joke about the unbelievable number of batteries required by boomboxes.

Building on Varon’s work, Berger’s influences seem to include Oscar Wilde and Maurice Sendak, those patron saints of sad children’s literature. There are nods to New York-centric ’80s movies such as Desperately Seeking Susan. There’s a bowling sequence that pays surreal homage to The Big Lebowski.

There’s a lot going on, but Robot Dreams never pushes one single message, instead allowing viewers to find their own ways in.

For kids, it will probably be a story about friends and how they make everything better. Young adults might read it as a queer fable about a life-altering relationship. (Gender and orientation remain indeterminate in Dog and Robot’s world.)

It can be seen as a tale of urban isolation and — especially in the wake of the COVID crisis — an affirmation of those humanizing everyday interactions we experience in our shared public spaces.

For those old enough the remember the 1980s, Robot Dreams will be about the profound memory of another time, another place or another set of feelings. It’s about that first love that ended or that summer friend you never saw again, and how those experiences resonate in the heart, even decades later.

However one reads it, this story of a dog, a robot and a city is meaningful, moving and just plain lovely.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca