Final Rating: 5/5
This year, I’m coming up on my tenth year of living in New York City. I came here by accident – I had initially hoped to land in the Bay Area to work in tech, but the only job offer I got out of college was in the Big Apple. Each time since then, whenever I’ve found myself between jobs, I’ve always contemplated moving elsewhere, but the vibe of city life and just how much happens only in New York ultimately kept me here.
Obviously New York has been depicted in films for as long as the medium has existed – from King Kong to Taxi Driver, Devil Wears Prada to Midnight Cowboy, The Warriors to Ghostbusters, and literally hundreds of others. And yet, the films that for me have best captured the vibe of actually living here as an everyman – not the high stakes drama of The Godfather or Goodfellas, or the sweeping romance of When Harry Met Sally and Breakfast at Tiffanys – are the animated films and the musicals.
Joe Gardner in Soul, Miles Morales in the Spiderverse movies, and the Turtles in TMNT: Mutant Mayhem all feel like folks I could bump into at my local bodega. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone like Jonathan Larsen as portrayed by Andrew Garfield in tick, tick… BOOM! or Anthony Ramos’s Usnavi from In the Heights dancing and singing in the subway.
There’s just something about the energy of the city that can’t be captured in conventional live action filmmaking – you need the reality shaping properties of musical theater or animation to really capture how larger than life the everyday feels in the five boroughs.
It is then appropriate that I was able to see the latest Oscar nominated animated film Robot Dreams at the Animation First film festival here in New York before it was released publicly elsewhere, and that it joins that canon of animated films that perfectly capture the vibe of life in New York City.
Based on the 2007 graphic novel Robot Dreams by Sara Varon and directed by Oscar nominated Spanish director Pablo Berger, the film tells the story of Dog who after facing his own loneliness orders a DIY companion in Robot. All is well in their lives until circumstances force them apart with only a vague hope that they will one day be reunited months in the future.
In the meantime, both deal with the separation in their own way. Dog tries to build other relationships to fill the Robot shaped hole in his life – to varying degrees of success – while Robot dreams of the potential futures with Dog after their time apart. Without too many spoilers, the ending is somewhat bittersweet, but a poignant moral on loss, growth, companionship, and the impact others have on our lives.
As with the original graphic novel, the film has no verbal dialogue beyond a few grunts or yells here or there. Despite that limitation, the audience has no question about what the characters mean to convey or what they are feeling (which the laughter throughout the screening attested to).
The score, composed by Alfonso de Vilallonga contributes heavily to this communication. In particular, a certain funky Earth Wind and Fire song (which is arguably my favorite song of all time) acts as a motif throughout the film to emotionally ground it in a way that has deepened my love for that track even more.
Beyond just the lack of dialogue, the film also draws from the clean linework and dynamic character designs to help really sell the expressiveness. The bright but not overbearing color palette and dynamic backgrounds really help sell the lived in feel of New York, with unique character designs of animals of all species in the background living their lives, just as New Yorkers do everyday. Fun fact this is the first time since 2015 that there have been two hand-drawn films in this Oscars category (with the other being The Boy and the Heron), which is I think a testament to the quality of the work done here.
Even if Robot Dreams is set in an alternate 80’s version of New York, its themes and messages are timeless and universal. I can’t really find anything of fault with the film, besides perhaps the eternal Goofy/Pluto question of how in a world of anthropomorphized ducks you also have small wild songbirds and pigeons flying around, and the fact that I could not go back and immediately rewatch this film as soon as it ended. While no release date has yet been set for Robot Dreams for wide distribution (though we were told it would be in the coming weeks), do yourself and see it as soon as you can. It is a worthy contender for this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar, and dare I say my personal pick of what I want to win. Regardless if it does or doesn’t, it certainly will be something that I Do Remember.
Robot Dreams was seen as part of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s 2024 Animation First Film Festival.
