Robot Dreams (2023)
Do androids dream of electric sheep? Not in this film. Here, the robot of the title dreams of New York sidewalks and other robots and sunflowers who tap-dance in a Busby Berkeley-style routine; but mostly it dreams of its companion, an anthropomorphic dog it has been separated from and yearns to see again.
The film opens in an East Village apartment, where our melancholic pooch with a paunch is playing Pong by himself. Responding to an ad, Dog – the characters have no personal names – mail-orders a robot companion who, once assembled, brims with childlike naivety and good-natured exuberance.
Their first scenes together play out like a series of early dates: a trip on a row boat, a night in with The Wizard of Oz (1939), roller-skating in Central Park to Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ (a song that will resurface as a plot device). Whether this is a friendship or a romance isn’t the point; what matters is that they care for one another, and indeed that Robot is capable of caring like a living creature.
This blossoming comes abruptly to a stop after a misadventure leaves Robot paralysed and stranded on a fenced-off beach. Powerless to rescue it, Dog returns to a life of solitude in the city. From here, the film takes on a more episodic rhythm, each season bringing new experiences to Dog and new visitors to Robot’s spot on the beach. But their bond endures in dreams, depicted in surreal sequences – electric sheep wouldn’t be entirely out of place – that reveal the characters’ attachment to one another and shared fear of abandonment. We see more of Robot’s dreams: poignantly, these are forever remixing the limited experiences it has had in its short life. The very fact that it can have dreams is perhaps the best proof that Robot is alive.
Not a word is spoken in the film. Writer-director Pablo Berger did something similar with Blancanieves (2012), his delightfully melodramatic live-action retelling of Snow White, but that was a pastiche of silent cinema, complete with intertitles. Here, he takes his cue from his source, Sara Varon’s graphic novel, also dialogue-free. The effect is to make the relationship between the protagonists, who already lack the particulars of human appearance, even more universal.
Although this is Berger’s first foray into animation, he directs with confidence. Characters and backgrounds are all clean lines and simple colour fills, and the schematic designs allow for some nice visual puns: in one sweet scene, Robot helps teach a hatchling bird to fly by arching and flapping the line of its mouth in imitation of wings. Fast, snappy editing propels the narrative. Shots are framed dynamically, ranging from close-ups that convey thoughts in the absence of words to extreme high-angle long shots, which emphasise Dog’s and Robot’s solitude. New York teems with a menagerie of animals – a busking octopus, a sunbathing proboscis monkey – amid which, once again, Dog often appears isolated.
We could read a bleaker story into the film’s premise, about a modern urban capitalist society atomised into lonely individuals who are then sold products to dull their anguish. But Robot Dreams doesn’t take a social perspective; almost no other character seems lonely like Dog is. In contrast to Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021), the film isn’t interested in Robot as an example of advanced artificial intelligence, nor in the implications its existence might have for society. It is set in the 1980s, when the fantasy of wholly unthreatening AI was perhaps still plausible.
Ultimately, Robot Dreams is a story about how swiftly and lastingly a bond of affection can mark a life, in which the protagonists just happen not to look human. The film strikes a very particular tone. It is easy to follow and entertaining in a way that speaks to children, but the emotions it deals with are adult ones. It riffs on romcom, sci-fi and horror tropes, and even plays with the cinematic frame in a surprising meta moment, but wears its references lightly, and is free of the irony and wisecracking that saturate so many family-oriented (and indeed adult) films today. Wistfulness hangs in the air. The film is not effusive – nobody cries – but it is touching, especially as it approaches its unexpected ending. I loved it for that.
► Robot Dreams is in UK cinemas from 22 March.