Watch it and weep
Robot Dreams a bittersweet tale of a beautiful friendship
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Digital Subscription
One year of digital access for only $205*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*First annual payment billed as $205.00 + GST for one year. This annual subscription will automatically renew at $233.00 + GST every 52 weeks (10% off the regular annual price of $259.35). Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Your next Brandon Sun subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $17.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/08/2024 (746 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.
Neon via AP
Dog meets Robot and fun times ensue in Robot Dreams.
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.
Neon via AP
Spanish director Pablo Berger’s animation reflects the look and feel of 1980s NYC in Robot Dreams.
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
Neon
All-ages animated film Robot Dreams has deeper messages that will resonate with adults.
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Movie review
Robot Dreams
Directed by Pablo Berger
● Dave Barber Cinematheque, until Aug. 28
● 102 minutes, G
★★★★★ out of five
Other voices
It leaves a lot of room for interpretation — depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer — but the takeaway is all tenderness.
— Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle
Berger’s film is rich, genuine and achingly real. Never mind this Manhattan’s menagerie — Robot Dreams is a movie that is all too human.
— Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail
This is an absolutely extraordinary work of art, done in a way that suggests both Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday-night prestige-TV dramedies. It’s also a nine-Kleenex-box movie, and earns every saline-soaked tissue eventually wadded at your feet.
— David Fear, Rolling Stone
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Advertisement Advertise With Us
Advertisement Advertise With Us
