‘Robot Dreams’: A beautiful love letter to a lost friendship and a lost city

Wordless, tender, wise, adult and childish. Describing the movie this way makes it seem easy, but Robot Dreams, Spanish director Pablo Berger’s fourth feature film, is a complex artistic achievement: an animated film that refers to characters with simple lines and pure and deep emotions. It’s a story about a dog, a robot and a city that transports the viewer to a place that Berger evokes with inspired melancholy.

Dog is a canine who lives alone in 1980s Manhattan. One day, he decides to buy a robot to keep him company. Loneliness was always especially hard in the city that never sleeps, where Berger lived for a decade. In this environment, the dog and the toy will forge a happy and loyal friendship to the beat of Earth Wind & Fire’s funk disco hit September and the rhythm of New York, which Berger reconstructs through the nostalgic pop iconography of the era that he resurrects: from the inside of the main character’s apartment to the street and its fauna, from the subway to the beach where the delicate and beautiful story’s drama unfolds.

Despite being an animated film, Robot Dreams is not so far removed from Berger’s first two feature films. It is silent (that is, there’s no dialogue or words, although there is sound), like Snow White (2012), and retro, like his debut movie, Torremolinos 73 (2003). But above all, it demonstrates Berger’s creative heterodoxy, a way of following his own path that is common to all his projects.

Robot Dreams’ drawings are endearing and full of magic, humor and feeling. They are drawings that connect details from the popular culture that flourished and disappeared during that time — such as the Tab cola can, a Naranjito sports bag and the ubiquitous boomboxes from the days of breakdance — with classic cinematographic references, such as the lonely Charlot and The Wizard of Oz, whose yellow brick road will be transformed into a Busby Berkeley-like floral choreography with a robot supplanting the tin man, while the Twin Towers loom in the background, crowning the false mirage of the promised land of Oz.

Minimalist in form, like the four drawing lines of the passage of the little birds that are born next to the robot on the beach, Robot Dreams takes the candor of its illustrations and the fetishism of its nostalgia toward something as deep as feelings of loneliness and abandonment and the inability to erase from a city the traces of the people who made us happy there. It’s the places and melodies of 1980s New York, soul and salsa. But the odd couple’s heart belongs to September and its famous intro: “Do you remember?”

That’s what Robot Dreams is all about—remembering, even if it hurts: an old friendship, an old city, an analog world that dealt with loneliness in its own way and, always, a song that ties it all together.

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