Robot Dreams review – a wordless wonder

If androids dream of electric sheep, then what about robots? Judging from the fantasies presented in the Oscar-nominated French-Spanish animation Robot Dreams, they can be colourful, surreal and psychedelic. Mostly, though, the film’s hapless Robot protagonist dreams of being reunited with Dog, his owner and best pal, after they are separated by cruel circumstance and he is left, rusted and alone, on an out-of-season pleasure beach.

The film’s source, Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name, is a delicate, wordless work that hinges solely on the relationship between the two friends with a gentle melancholy rising out of the dialogue-free void. And Spanish director Pablo Berger is no stranger to non-verbal cinema: his last film to receive a UK release was 2012’s Blancanieves, a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale that resets the story to 1920s Spain and employs inky black-and-white cinematography and period-appropriate silent cinema stylings.

Robot Dreams is Berger’s first fling with animation, and he takes to the new artform with evident and infectious enthusiasm. Where the frames of Varon’s comic are pointedly minimalist, every frame in Robot Dreams is a glorious ‘Where’s Wally?’ fresco of references, nods and in-jokes.

Dog and Robot are adrift in a bustling metropolis populated by countless unique anthropomorphic creatures, with the accumulated detail presenting a strange and delightfully specific evocation of New York City in the 1980s: an era of microwave dinners, Tab soft drinks, and Pong played on CRT TV sets. Meanwhile, outside Dog’s cramped apartment, the city’s culture is in the ascendant: keep your eyes peeled for wildlife variants of Madonna, Spike Lee and Jean-Michel Basquiat roaming the streets.

Where this excess may threaten to overwhelm the film’s central story, it instead infuses it with renewed meaning, insisting on the importance of connection through the cacophony of the big city. Berger can’t resist indulging in the expressionistic possibilities of the medium – from kaleidoscopic, Oz-like vistas, to stirring roller-skating sequences set to Earth, Wind and Fire’s ‘September’, to even a Busby Berkeley-throwback dance number. Yet it’s in the smaller flourishes that Robot Dreams excels.

The deceptively simple designs of Dog and Robot are made of clear lines and soft colours that recall the most appealing children’s picture book, but the team of animators (headed by animation director Benoît Féroumont) bring meticulous attention to detail to how these characters live on screen. Without a word, their gestures and microexpressions suggest a whole spectrum of feeling as they weather their respective emotional trials.

The magic trick pays off when Robot Dreams takes an unexpected turn, and reveals itself not to be a straightforward tale of reconciliation, but a more wise and worldly musing on the passing of time and the necessary transience of all things. How the vivid experiences of today – the sights, the sounds, the people we love – will become the nostalgic dreams of tomorrow.

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