Imaginative, sweet and brilliantly observed, Robot Dreams is a deceptively simple animation set in an alternate New York of the 1980s, where animals rather than people crowd the city streets, delis and subways, and a lonely dog living on his own decides, on a whim, to buy one of those flatpack robots he’s seen advertised on the TV.
Before long he’s screwing together the bits and pieces delivered to his door. Eventually he hits the “on” button and, after a creak, lo and behold his robot rises, winks, smiles and the two of them fall almost instantly in love.
In one of those romantic montage sequences, out they go into New York. Hot dogs are eaten, subways are ridden and they go skating together in Central Park, where Earth, Wind and Fire’s song September is playing on someone’s boombox. It becomes their tune.
Is Dog a male? Is Robot? Keep asking yourself questions like that if you want to kill any enjoyment in the film. Instead surrender to the scenario. It does not, in any case, last for long. Because after a trip to Coney Island (I think), and a swim in the sea (ill-advised for a metal mickey, surely, you’ll be muttering), Robot seizes solid with rust and is stuck on the fenced-off and padlocked beach. Not just for the night – it’s the very last day of the season and so he’s going to be there until the beach re-opens the following year.
The bulk of the movie plays out here. While Robot waits patiently for Dog to return, he has his titular dreams, most of them involving getting back to Dog’s apartment to continue the moist-eyed relationship. One goes a bit further than that, and evolves into a full-blown Busby Berkeley-style dance number involving flowers. In the real here and now, meanwhile, bad stuff happens. A limb hacked off by some passing rabbits who use a Robot toe to repair a hole in their boat. Eventually a detectorist arrives searching for beach treasure and Robot ends up in bits at a scrapyard. But the story isn’t quite over yet.
While all this has been going on, Dog has been busting a gut trying to get Robot off the beach. Fails. Sinks into a depressed state. Before shaking himself out of it with a holiday. Dog moves on, as we’re told to repeatedly. And then… well, why ruin the movie.
It is a poignant story told entirely without words. Ivan Labanda provides the yelps and beeps of Dog and Robot and director Pablo Berger keeps switching point of view to make things more energetic than you might expect from a story focused largely on an inert pile of metal marooned on a wintry beach. Detail is important in this film, and it’s why you could watch it several times – little things like the way Dog’s food blips in the microwave. In the fateful sequence where Dog and Robot go swimming in the sea, there’s a glimpse of a crab that’s re-purposed an old tin of crab meat as a shell. Dog fiddling with the zip on his puffa jacket. Robot watching a mother bird teaching her chicks to fly.
In New York breakdancers convene on corners and people vault over the subway barriers to avoid paying, it’s all going on. As much as anything, this is an ode to the Big Apple of yore.
Kids will lap it up as is. Their parents will drink in the nostalgic detail plus Berger’s little nods here and there – an explicit recreation of that famous shot on a bench from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, the way that Robot comes to life mimicking Nosferatu in Murnau’s original version of the film, then Frankenstein’s monster. People eat Chupa Chups. Look, there’s a can of Brasso. In one brilliant sequence Dog goes to Chinatown and you can almost smell its sweet tang.
Berger did something vaguely similar with his dark and drastic live-action repurposing of Snow White (Blancanieves) in 2012, but this is much more kiddie-friendly and cute. He’s working from Sara Varon’s graphic novel and stays true to its style and vibe. At one point you’ll see Dog’s ID – his name is Dog Varon. Robot has been made, we learn, by the Berger Corp.
Detail, it’s all about the detail. And love. Connection. Heartbreak. The little stuff and the big stuff. No wonder it’s been fighting off the awards. A classic.
Robot Dreams – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
