Robot Dreams Review: Pablo Berger’s Life-Affirming Ode to Friendship and Loss

Writer-director Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams opens on a nighttime shot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan skyline in the distance. The year is 1984, and the Twin Towers loom, figuratively and literally, as ghostly figures. Berger’s breathtaking adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel of the same name isn’t about the towers in any specific fashion, but about a world in which change is the only constant, life of any kind is at the mercy of randomness, and joy and melancholy are in ongoing symbiosis. In other words, our world—albeit one populated here, not by humans, but by anthropomorphic, humanoid animals.

Our surrogate in this world is Dog. At home by himself on a summer night, he’s drawn to a television commercial’s beckoning text (“Are you alone?”) and orders the product advertised, initially unseen by the viewer. Robot is soon delivered (some assembly required), and their burgeoning friendship suggests an Edenic proposition—which is to say, a fleeting paradise.

Innocence is lost on an otherwise joyous day at the beach, where Robot’s time in the water leads to him rusting in place in the hours following, too heavy for Dog to move. Forced to leave him behind, Dog returns the next day, tools and repair books in hand, only to find the beach closed for the season, an officer at the ready to escort him away. His subsequent, substantial efforts to get back to his friend, both legal and not, consistently fail. Dog waits. Robot dreams.

The film expands on its source material with cinematic cunning, from a nod to Buster Keaton’s most famous stunt to a Busby Berkeley-style musical number. It also smartly re-contextualizes other passages from the novel, such as a lovely vignette involving a snowman come to life that plays out in actuality in Varon’s book, here repurposed into a dream. Likewise, the details with which a bygone era of New York is rendered are astonishing, from the fashion of the populace to the ambiance of the First Avenue subway station, to the fact that Dog and Robot rent The Wizard of Oz from Kim’s Video, a nod to the director’s own experiences.

The film’s simple but never simplistic hand-drawn animation suggests the emotional immediacy of something like the stop-motion work of the Wallace & Gromit pictures. The creators’ fingerprints aren’t literally visible here, but the soulfulness exhibited in the characters’ eyes and body language has the same impact. The sound design may be even more impressive—a pulsing, nearly living creation that makes the storytelling exponentially more resonant. Alfonso de Vilallonga’s piano-driven score evokes the unpretentious purity of a silent film, and the soundtrack’s handful of pop songs—particularly Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” which provides the central leitmotif—crystallize the film’s thesis statement.

What that statement is will surely be the source of ongoing discussion. In working almost purely as metaphor, Robot Dreams effortlessly brings a sense of universality to its story. The ups and downs experienced by Dog and Robot throughout, whether together or apart, speak to the multitude of ways life surprises us, giving and taking away in equal measure. And that resonance is tied to the deeply earned inclusion of The Wizard of Oz as a touchstone, at one point movingly serving as the inspiration for one of Robot’s slumbering flights of fancy. Like that classic, Robot Dreams is uniquely miraculous, effortlessly heartbreaking and life-affirming, and as such poised to become many things to many people in a way few movies can.