I watched Robot Dreams, which is an animated movie about a lonely Dog who buys a Robot companion.
Robot Dreams is a Spanish-French co-production that adapts Sara Varon’s 2016 children’s graphic novel of the same title. The movie is completely dialogue-free, though, and it’s set in New York City; much of it takes place in a very recognizable and specific version of the East Village neighborhood, and the characters visit landmarks like the Strand Bookstore and Ocean Beach. It premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and it went on to play a variety of other festivals around the world before opening in Spain and France in December 2023.
I was looking forward to it, but the story didn’t hit as hard as I was hoping it would, but it was also funnier than I was expecting. I particularly liked two parts in the film. The first was the beginning, when Dog sits down in their living room. In the background, across the street in another building, you can see two characters who are close to each other sit down in their living room. The kind of distance between dog’s solitude and these two characters felt particularly heavy to me. The second is near the end, when Robot plays the music Dog and them bonded over, and they both dance in sync. Dog notices Robot out of the corner of their eye, and Robot hides from sight. This aspect of the story at the end, which felt like acceptance and moving on, was a nice note to end on I think.
At least in the movie, Dog is depicted as being kind of pathetic and can’t really do much on their own. Their life is also similarly dreary, with a dependence on microwaved food. It feels like Dog is stuck in a vicious cycle, but for some reason it turns out okay for them at the end. Given my own experience with loneliness, I can’t help but feel that the ending doesn’t land for me. From my perspective, this vicious cycle will wear you down into tatters, but the movie never goes that far. It’s much more whimsical and lighthearted. I don’t mind the movie ending the way it did, but it feels like the positive moments don’t have the emotional weight they ought to have because it’s not contrasted sufficiently enough with negative experiences. Granted, the movie does do this a little, but I can’t help but feel like the movie falls a bit short for me.