A charming animated movie nominated for an Oscar, Robot Dreams, which opens throughout Israel on Thursday, is by and for hipsters, not kids, and will surely please that demographic.
The Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars tends to be dominated by the big studios, such as Pixar, with even their mediocre offerings, such as Toy Story 4, getting wins. So it’s refreshing to see a more independent movie like Robot Dreams, by Pablo Berger – a Spanish director who made such films as Blancanieves, a twist on Snow White, and which was based on a book by Sara Varon – get at least the recognition of a nod, since it represents a growing trend of animated movies for adult audiences.
Although Robot Dreams is inventive and well-made, this year the statuette is likely to be awarded to Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, The Boy and the Hero, or Pixar’s Elemental.
But Robot Dreams has many virtues, one of which is that it is a wordless story, told visually and by music and sound effects, recalling the Pixar 2008 film, WALL-E by Andrew Stanton. It’s not easy to sustain action like that for an entire film, and Berger manages to keep the story moving without any dialogue.
The movie is set in a world where people are replaced by animals, and the main character is a dog, who is lonely and orders a robot from a commercial he sees on late-night TV. He and the robot, who is as alive as the dog (this movie will not soothe those who fret over AI taking over the world), bond instantly – and now the dog has someone to watch The Wizard of Oz with.
When they take a trip to the beach, the robot is enchanted and runs into the water, but later is too rusted out to move. The dog goes to get help but when he comes back with a tool kit, the beach has been closed until the spring – it seems they were there on the last day of the season. He tries to break in but is arrested and writes a note to himself to come back in June. Separated, the dog and robot have all kinds of adventures as they try to reunite and make new friends. Some of these idylls turn out to be dreams, which become annoying at times.
The movie works best as a love letter to New York
BUT THE MOVIE works best as a kind of love letter to the New York City of that era. It painstakingly recreates the feeling of New York’s East Village in the 80s, as few films ever have, and I’ll bet it’s a place where Berger spent some time. Early on, we see a shot of Manhattan as viewed from Brooklyn, and the World Trade Center is all lit up, so there’s no mistaking the period.
Animation is a great medium to capture the spirit of Alphabet City, around Second Avenue, as every inch of wall space is filled with graffiti, and instead of chain drugstores and national banks, there are check-cashing places, bodegas, pizzerias that serve greasy slices, and flea markets. Characters visit those little stores in Chinatown before they got so generic and buy extraordinary kites that seem magical.
It was not a crime-free time and place, to put it mildly, and there are toughs who hang out on the street corner, who are embodied by various predatory animals. Halloween of that time is nicely recreated, too, as is 80s television, with ads for ginsu knives.
The music is an important element, with songs such as Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” in many variations, emphasizing and enhancing the action.
Recreating the East Village of decades ago will be fun for adult viewers, but not for the vast majority of children, so ignore how appealing this movie looks on the poster and don’t bring your kids, who won’t be able to stick with it. Even as someone who does appreciate all the 80s flourishes, I got impatient with the film, which would have worked far better with a shorter running time, say an hour rather than 90 minutes. While there is much to like in Robot Dreams, I would have enjoyed it more had there been less of it.