"Robot Dreams": Friendship Flourishes in a Dreamy Vintage New York

"Robot Dreams" is one of the best animated movies of recent years. Do not feel guilty if the name does not ring a bell. It's hard to make an impression in the animated market, even if fortune smiles at you. The movie sneaked into many Best of 2023 lists after snagging a limited theatrical release by cooler-than-thou distributor Neon, culminating its stellar run with an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature Film. It lost to the undeniable "The Boy and the Heron" (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023), but that does not diminish the achievement of writer-director Pablo Berger.

Based on American children's book author Sara Varon, "Robot Dreams" tracks the friendship between a solitary dog and the robot he buys to satisfy his need for companionship. The action occurs in a fanciful realm where anthropomorphic animals live as people do. They go to the library, fly kites, and frolic on the beach. The one thing they don't do is to talk. Varon conveys her story solely through illustrations, drawn with simple sketches that push Herge's "clean line" style to an understated extreme.

Berger sticks to the wordless scheme but blows up the undefined, universal setting and moves the story to a dreamlike animated version of Manhattan circa the early '80s. The screen pulsates with riotous life and rich details. Signs of the times constantly capture your eyes. Dog plays Pong in his Atari console. The shelves of his small apartment are full of Milton Bradley board games and puzzles. Nostalgia manifests itself in ways that transcend the detritus of daily life. A female cat dressed like Madonna circa "Holiday" roams the neighborhood streets, a Keith Haring mural is visible, and you might catch an animal version of Jean Michel Basquiat schlepping a huge canvas around town.

Berger is a sucker for high and low culture, and it shows. He even uses it to identify with Dog and virtually scribble his signature in the movie. A couple of detailed shots show Dog carrying around a bag graced by the likeness of Naranjito (roughly translated as "little orange-boy"). Orange as in the fruit, not the color, although he is as orange as the emblematic citrus from Valencia. The fanciful character was the mascot of the 1982 World Cup, held in Berger's native Spain. Public TV broadcaster RTVE and Nippon Animation joined forces to produce "Futbol en Acción" (Soccer in Action), an animated series featuring the soccer-mad fruit and his gang of friends, resolving the world's problems through football - alright, soccer!-. Get thee to YouTube if you want to glance at this oddity.

The dreamy, vivid New York setting and the commitment to a virtually wordless narrative eased its entry into the American market. There are no pesky subtitles or iffy dubbing to drive a wedge between the audience and the story. Dog and Robot bond over movies, riding the subway, roller skating in Central Park, and practicing wild moves to the rhythm of Earth, Wind, and Fire's "September" blasting out of a boom box - the song becomes an aural symbol of friendship.

The two buddies spend a lovely day at Ocean Beach. Unwisely, Robot joins Dog in the water, bringing an acute case of rustiness. He ends up immobilized as he lays on the sand, too heavy to be propped up and carried away. The beach closes, and Dog must leave. He plans to return the following day to solve the predicament. As luck would have it, it's the last beach day before the season closes. When Dog arrives armed with a box of tools, he finds foreboding chains and fences separating him from his immobilized friend. Attempts to enter by force or bureaucracy fail. Months will pass. Will they ever reunite?

Berger's filmography is short but daring. His debut, "Torremolinos '73" (2003), is a nostalgic evocation of European sex comedies from the seventies, with Javier Cámara and Candela Peña as a regular middle-class couple dabbling in pornography in the waning years of the Franco dictatorship. Even at his greenest and most conventional, Berger takes the viewers to unexpected places. His follow-up was "Blancanieves" (2012), a fanciful retelling of the Brother Grimm's story, staged in Seville at the dawn of the XX Century. He conceived the film as a vintage silent movie from the era. Both movies were perhaps too "Spanish" for American audiences - and maybe the success of the French faux silent Oscar winner "The Artist" (2011) stole its thunder.  Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius cannily staged his behind-the-camera drama in early Hollywood. Berger may have taken the hint, taking Varon's wisp of a fable to the Big Apple and fleshing it out with incidents that open up her ideas and let them loose in a recognizable world.

American animation ran to a creative dead end, trying to appeal to adults and kids. Call it the Shrek Effect: a combination of simple jokes and frantic action for the minors. Off-color pop-culture zingers for the seniors. "Robot Dreams" presents itself as an alternative. It's a combination of nerdiness and feeling. For all its city symphony bravado, the movie is most compelling at conveying how loneliness feels, even if surrounded by multitudes. Dog and Robot establish significant emotional connections with others, but they are, at best, brief. At worst, they expose cruelty with such directness that you understand why some would buy a mechanical friend instead of making them the old-fashioned way. Try to follow Dog's encounter with a couple of downright evil anteaters without having your blood boil. It's virtually impossible.

In one instance, Berger seems to fumble the balance between adult preoccupations and childish innocence. Relationships are unencumbered by gender or desire. A female duck befriends our hero while he tries to fly a kite and fills some days with excitement. In Varon's book, the episode stars a family of three birds who take on the canine as a virtual son before migrating to Florida - Berger sends his symbolic love interest to Barcelona in another wink to his fellow Spaniards.

The mixed signals do not spoil the movie. "Robot Dreams" is a fantastic piece of entertainment, wise about the unpredictability of life that can derail friendship, but it does not diminish its power.

* "Robot Dreams" is available on VOD. Streaming at Hulu.