(082224) Robot Dreams is an utterly charming and highly imaginative animated film about the unusual friendship between a lonely Labrador and a primitive looking, wide eyed robot. It is a far better buddy film than Deadpool & Wolverine and it’s a much more consistent animated feature than The Boy and His Heron even though that film was more creative in a trippy way. Like The Artist, Robot Dreams is a completely silent period piece that manages to pack more of an emotional punch than a vast majority of the films that are made with dialogue.

Robot Dreams was a breakout hit at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for best animated film at the 2024 Oscars alongside Elemental and Spiderman Across the Universe, it lost to the equally worthy The Boy and His Heron. This month it has finally opened in selected Chicago theaters, and it will also soon be available on Amazon Prime, and it should go to the top of your must watch list.

Robot Dreams was based on an acclaimed graphic novel by the Chicago resident, Sara Veron who received a Harvey Award for her previous graphic novel Sweater Weather (2007) in 2023. The film significantly expands and fleshes out her very short graphic novel of the same name. Veron is going to appear in person at the Sunday, August 25 screening of the film a 3:00 O'Clock Facets Multimedia for a "Q and A" session.

The film was directed by Spanish film maker Pablo Berger who also made the acclaimed silent film, Blancanieves (2013) which was loosely based on Snow White by Brothers Grimm. Robot Dreams was thought of by its director as "a comic turned into animated drawings," The animators never seem to be showing off, and the animation style never calls attention to itself. The clean, plain, simple animation (by today’s standards) style is perfect for telling this particular story. The animation was heavily influenced by the Ligne Claire style which originated in a French Belgium school led by Dutch artist Herge who did The Adventures of Tintin. It is known for using clear strong lines with hatching which involves drawing or painting closely spaced parallel lines that create shading or tonal effects, and it downplays contrast. The film uses the cartoon equivalent of deep focus because the background objects are as clear as those in the foreground in every scene. The 2-D visuals are not always as mind blowing as bigger budget efforts such as Spiderman Across the Universe or or some other Pixar classics like Toy Story.  But all the characters here are written better than the ones in those films and they seem completely human even if they are robots, raccoons, or canine.

Much of the action in this silent film occurs in the dreams or imagination of its robot protagonist, hence the title. Robot Dreams seems timeless, and it reminded me of many other classic films. It has the same sense of childlike wonder as The Red Balloon, and it is nearly as humanistic and life affirming as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The film makers clearly love humanity and show the best side of people even when they are represented as animals or androids.

The film begins by showing us the day-to-day life of a dog who lives in a high rise building in New York's East Village in an anthropomorphic version of NYC of the 1980s. The dog (not so creatively named Dog) has a boring, pointless life. He spends most of his directionless days playing pong and watching TV infomercials. Then one day Dog sees an ad for an Amica 300 robot and in a desperate attempt to ease his solitude he orders it and builds his own mechanical companion. The two quickly become inseparable and do everything together. It is not clear whether their relationship is just friendship or something more. The relationship is platonic but there are times when they seem like a couple. What is clear is that they are completely devoted to each other. They complement each other perfectly and the dog is practical and pragmatic while the robot is more adventurous, and he wants to dive right into life.

The pair have a near perfect existence for a while as they travel around and enjoy the sites in New York. The pair spent a glorious day touring the city which I actually enjoyed almost as much as my real trip to the Big Apple. They spend their time watching fireworks on Brooklyn Bridge, dancing in Central Park and since it is the eighties of course playing lots of Pong everywhere.

Although it is animated, this film manages to capture the vitality and energy of the real New York as well as any film I have ever seen. There are not any humans in this reality, but all of the animals are partially dressed and act like humans (perhaps this is what Howard the Duck’s world would be like.) Except they never talk. The New York in this film is a fantastic richly visualized alternate reality in which punk rock apes, Penguins coexist with boom boxes owning giraffes, bison carrying mail and elegant intelligent llamas.

The song of this unconventional couple is "September" by soul/jazz/pop group Earth Wind and Fire. The pair are singing their song at Coney Island Beach (which was the subject of Ferlinghetti’s greatest poem: ‘A Coney Island of the Mind), right before a tragedy happens and their life takes a negative turn.

For some reason the robot freezes up on the beach and we don’t know if it’s because it is out of energy or oil or some other reason. Dog cannot pick up the robot because he is too heavy, and the sad canine ends up having to abandon him. He tries to sneak back onto the beach to retrieve the robot after it is closed but a monstrous gorilla cop roughly ejects him out of the beach. When the beach closes for the winter Dog marks his calendar so he can be there to get the robot back at the reopening. But will he be able to get back before something terrible happens to his bucket headed friend?

There is a series of vignettes in which the poor immobile robot has different dreams that are both good and bad. We cannot always tell what is real or fantasy which heightens the suspense, in one sequence the robot dreams that some kind strangers on the beach feed him oil which takes away his paralysis but in real life they are actually torturing him and begin to take him apart. In another he finds love when a family of friendly birds builds a nest in his armpit. You do not want to know what the evil crocodile does to him.

In one of the most charming and whimsically delightful scenes in the film, the robot and dog watch Wizard of Oz which obviously gets embedded in their imagination. The robot later imagines that the twin towers become the Emerald City’s skyline and as he walks down the yellow brick road, he is dazzled by dancing dandelion scenes who interact as if they are in a 30s Busby Berkeley dance number. This beautiful sequence even tops the marvelous scene in Deadpool & Wolverine  (one of the best ones in that film) in which Deadpool slaughters enemies with Wolverine’s skeleton while dancing to NSYNC.