A lonely urban dog constructs a robot companion, booting up a curious and beautiful friendship against the backdrop of 1980s New York City. This unlikely duo is at the heart of Robot Dreams, the debut animated feature film from Spanish director Pablo Berger, based on the popular graphic novel by American writer Sara Varon.
The film premiered at Cannes last May, and went on to win several honors along the festival circuit, including at Annecy (Contrechamp Award for Best Film), Sitges (Audience Award for Best Motion Picture), the Bucheon International Animation Festival (Audience Prize for International Feature) and Animation Is Film in Los Angeles (Special Jury Prize for Feature Film). With the 2023-24 awards season in full swing, Robot Dreams has already picked up the animated feature prize at the European Film Awards, is nominated for four Goya Awards and three Gaudí Awards, and is considered a strong contender for a nomination spot from the Academy Awards (see the qualified longform animated titles here).
With the film due to arrive in North American theaters from NEON, Pablo Berger sat down for a videocall interview with Jonas Poher Rasmussen — an established Danish documentarian who likewise made a big splash with his entry into animation, Flee, which made history with nominations for the animated feature, international feature and documentary feature at the 94th Oscars. The filmmakers talk about the universal appeal of Robot Dreams, its themes of friendship, loneliness and letting go and the magic of animation.
Berger talks about why the original graphic novel was so important to him. “I read the graphic novel in 2010, fell in love with the images and the story. I am a live-action director. After making three live action films, I remembered the graphic novel and the fact that the end of the book really moved me deeply and brought him to tears, something that literature and cinema have done to me, but never a graphic novel …This is my time to get into animation. I had no other choice but making this animated film.”
“All my previous films prepared me for Robot Dreams,” he adds. “I always had an animation director inside of me. I always spent a year doing storyboards before making my live-action movies. For me, to spend a year doing storyboards felt natural. I’ve done it before.”
The director, who grew up outside Bilbao and later moved to New York to study and work, also pointed out: “New York is a definitely character in the movie. It’s an American city. Sara Varon was living in New York when she created [Robot Dreams]. Had to make it mine too. I lived in New York City for 10 years. I was a lonely dog, like the protagonist. I found love and it broke my heart, and I found love again. For me, it’s nostalgic … It made me an adult and a filmmaker. It was one of the biggest reasons for me to make this film.”
Watch the conversation below and gain more insight into Berger’s process in our previous exclusive here.
And here’s the newly released U.S. trailer for the movie, made available by NEON today:
