Guy Lodge Film Critic Android or artificial intelligence isn’t the enemy in “Robot Dreams,” Pablo Berger‘s gently whimsical fantasy of a loner finding manufactured friendship in a scuzzy vision of 1980s New York City.
Indeed, one takeaway from this portrait of a shabby-happy Big Apple populated solely with anthropomorphic animals and surprisingly sensitive automatons is that the world might be a better place without humans in it.
Like “Blancanieves,” his silent, flamenco-styled spin on Snow White, Berger’s fourth feature dispenses with dialogue in favor of cheerfully expressive, faux-naive visual storytelling.
In all other respects, however, “Robot Dreams” is a significant left turn for the Spanish writer-director, beginning with an entirely fresh medium for him: simple, sharp-lined 2D animation in the manner of a pastel-softened “BoJack Horseman.” Both the film’s aesthetic and its wordless approach, however, are rooted in American author and illustrator Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name.
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