The Daily Telegraph - Features
Your kids will laugh – you’ll weep buckets
Robot Dreams PG cert, 102 min ★★★★★ Dir Pablo Berger
Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-yearold could effortlessly grasp.
With any luck, a number of six-year-olds are about to, since this animated Oscar nominee, a long-stewing passion project from Spain’s Pablo Berger, is opening in British cinemas just in time for the Easter break. And it’s certainly as perfectly suited to family viewing as vintage Pixar: kids will be amused and enchanted, and any accompanying grown-ups existentially destroyed.
Freely adapted from a 2007 graphic novel by Sara Varon, and infused with Berger’s own experiences of living in New York in his youth, the film is as simple on its surface as it is rich, humane and clear-sighted just beneath it. A lonely dog, called Dog, orders a robotic companion called Robot through the post, and the two are soon firm friends.
When Robot rusts during a trip to the beach, Dog scampers off to find a means of fixing him. As Robot waits for his return, his mind wanders hazily in the gaps between eccentric passers-by taking an interest in his plight.
The action has the clarity of a fable, but the texture of a classic city symphony film. New York City of the Eighties isn’t just another character in the movie, to coin an old critics’ cliché. It’s the divine mover behind Dog and Robot’s companionship, inscrutable yet benevolent, and always quietly working away behind the scenes.
The crisp ligne claire art style, familiar from European comics such as Tintin, is also deceptively straightforward, capturing so many funny and recognisable details of human behaviour in its colouring-book contours. And the Earth, Wind & Fire disco anthem September is deployed so effectively as a recurring friendship theme that by the end the words “ba-dee-ya” were enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Yet as warm as the film may be, it’s far from sappy. Later on, Robot Dreams becomes as concerned with friendship’s limits as much as its rewards – a valuable lesson for any child to ponder, and one that may prompt older viewers to reflect on forgotten but formative relationships from their younger years. Hence the Pixar-esque sniffly devastation Berger’s film is liable to wreak on older viewers. While adult viewers may or may not opt to bring some kids along, a wad of Kleenex is non-negotiable.
In cinemas now