As cute as the images of ROBOT DREAMS are, the feelings the film is about are mature, honest and touching. ROBOT DREAMS is about loneliness, grief, loss, about picking yourself up again, growing up, and friendship – those that don’t last and those that may open new perspectives. At the center is lonely “dog“ who plays Pong against himself alone in his apartment in 1980s New York and buys a robot assembly kit and builds a robot who becomes his best friend. Both of them are as happy together as friends can be, but then something happens that shakes up the life of “Dog“ and “Robot“ and changes everything.

ROBOT DREAMS is one of the rare cases in which the film is better than the template, which isn’t Isaac Asimov’s short story with the same title, but Sara Varon’s comic. Director Pablo Berger (BLANCANIEVES) expands the story and makes Varon's minimalist and deliberately not-too-cute drawings, which come from the US indie comic scene, prettier and more complex, especially in the detailed, lovingly drawn backgrounds.

ROBOT DREAMS won pretty much everything that a Spanish-Catalan animated film can win, including two Goyas and an Oscar nomination, and dozens of other awards, also a prize for Best Comedy. The film is incredibly funny, but if you don't shed a tear at ROBOT DREAMS, you can safely be replaced by artificial intelligence. The painfully concrete metaphors that Sara Varon and Pablo Berger found for the first loss and disappointment in life turns the film into a milestone of animated cinema.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy