Robot Dreams

Alternately sweet and brutal. But mostly brutal. Frankly, I’m not quite sure what to make of this movie. Generally, I like my movies—including my animated movies—to come with a healthy dose of snappy dialogue, so this mostly wordless work operates at a disadvantage right there. The story of friendship found and then lost and then (kinda sorta) found again has its effective moments, but most of those are the joyful instances when the main characters are building their relationship. When things go south, that’s when the brutal comes in, and it is difficult to accept the notion that the sorrows are ever truly overcome, despite an ultimately upbeat denouement. Upbeat is a good term here, considering that music plays a major role in telling the tale—somewhat naturally, given the lack of spoken language; the filmmakers, to their credit, have some excellent taste in tunes, and that helps a lot of this flick to go down a bit easier. Still, one cannot help but see the sorrowful side ultimately winning out; perhaps it’s my own lived experience speaking, but I think the biggest takeaway from this film is that, even in their dreams, losers are losers, and thus they just simply lose. That’s a hard nut to crack. Beyond story basics, the movie presents some good animation, with very representative depictions of ‘80s New York City (except for having a Mets game at Yankee Stadium, for some reason), with the old cityscape beautifully rendered in many scenes, as well as offering a wide range of literally well-drawn animal characters throughout (the better to doll up the story’s harder edges). Certainly, this is a well crafted work and deserving of attention—I just can’t escape the feeling that it ultimately comes across as a bit of a downer. And, the lack of dialogue is probably why the film seems longer than it is; not that the story drags, but it begins to feel drawn out after a point. So watching this movie presents some challenges as well as rewards. give it a look, but don’t expect a standard animated laugh riot.