Imagine me and you, a pet and an appliance, no love
could be more true
dir: Pablo Berger
2023
Do you remember? The Twenty-First Night of September? Or the band Earth, Wind and Fire, and their song September?
Because if you don’t, you’ll know it as fucking intimately as possible after watching this goddamn animated movie.
The last time I heard a song so often that I never wanted to hear it ever again, it was while I was watching Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express where they played California Dreaming so many goddamn times I never wanted to hear from the Mommas or the Poppas ever again as long as I lived.
Is it a great song? Are either of them great songs? I don’t know any more. I don’t care anymore. I just want those earworms out of my head.
Robot Dreams is made by a Spanish-French team, which set the production in the 1980s, and mostly stars an anthropomorphic dog character called Dog who posts away for and eventually receives a robot in the mail, who is called Robot. And all this transpires in an animated New York populated mostly by anthropomorphic animals and a few robots, under the shadow of the Twin Towers.
There is no dialogue in this whole flick. It doesn’t really need dialogue, but, since there are telephones and such, you feel like they all can talk, but they don’t need to in order to tell this story. Maybe they’re talking just before and just after the bits we see.
And what is this story? Well, I think it’s about loneliness, but I could be wrong.
As far as I could tell Dog doesn’t have a job, but he has a decent enough (definitely rent-controlled) one bedroom apartment, and a television, and… what more did people want back in the 80s?
Dog sees the metropolis of New York, teeming with people, but feels that all the rest of them have somebody that they are intertwined with. He has no-one.
So he orders someone through the mail(?) Robot turns up in a box, Dog puts him together, and then they get to spend some blissful days and nights together.
Who needs words when you have perfect understanding? Also, is this relationship a metaphor for prostitution? I mean, dog “buys” Robot, so does this transaction underpin the nature of their relationship? Maybe I’m overthinking it.
Or maybe I’m underthinking it.
Quite early in the film, once their bond has been made firm, they travel to the beach, and have a great day out in the water and on the sand. Oh, what joys they experience together! So much joy. They wear themselves out, to the point where a long nap is in order. Imagine that, napping on a beach towel as a gentle sea breeze wafts over you, lying next to your best friend, holding hands.
Then you wake up, the beach is closed, and your robot friend is rusted in place.
This happens surprisingly early in the film. Robot is trapped, unable to move, on the beach, and Dog isn’t allowed back onto the beach, despite trying a couple of times before giving up, until June next year.
It’s the middle of summer, so, presumably, it’s something like ten months away? For the longest time, the arbitrary goofiness of what separates them plagued me. It plagued me, until I accepted that this is the story they wanted to tell, so whatever obstacle separates them, however dumb, is necessary from a storytelling point of view. Because that yearning to be reunited, or the tension we have wondering how and when they’ll get back together, is the point.
So Dog is back to being lonely, and Robot endures isolation and immobility, in order to have some of the dreams of reuniting with Dog that gives the flick its title. Robot dreams… of Busby Berkeley musical sequences crossed with Wizard of Oz motifs, of being rescued, of being able to walk out of frame, out of the literal frame in which the robot finds themselves, in order to escape by turning the page, so to speak.
Interspersed with the dreams are actual sequences where things actually happen to or near Robot – a bird decides to build her nest in the crook of his arm; a sinking boat of rabbits decide to mangle one of his legs on the off chance that it fixes their leak – it does not.
And then, Robot endures a fate seemingly worse than death.
Dog fills the void with… television, by trying to meet other people, going on a ski trip where these arsehole anteaters try to kill him for no good reason, strikes up what seems like a promising friendship / romance with a Duck, and finally resorts to the same outlet that he resorted to at the beginning of the movie – paying to get an enforced companion, but this time in gold.
And Robot, despite his dire circumstances, finds a new lease on life, and a new potential companion. And yet what does that mean for the relationship he had with Dog?
This is a leisurely, slow, wry, slow-arsed story that would definitely not appeal to kids, who would be bored out of their goddamn minds, because in no way does it look, sound or act like any of what is expected when you talk about an animated movie. This slice of life type bullshit is usually reserved for depressed people doing depressed stuff like at least half of the mumblecore miserablist movies that are out there, and there’s usually a lot of drinking or drug taking involved.
And while I did find it a bit of a slog, I still found it touching, even as each new time that the goddamn song September played, or, even worse, when Robot atonally hums the melody, I ground my teeth into powder. It plays a crucial part in the way the story resolves, and I can’t argue with that since it’s a song that carries so much meaning for Dog and Robot at that point.
I don’t know that I entirely get what they were going for, or why they took such a long, long, long-arsed route to get to the fireworks factory (they never get there, spoiler alert), but I get longing, I get the ache for something that you fear you’ll never feel again, and I get acceptance, the idea that at some point you have to let go of people and let them be free. And while there is a gentle sweetness to the storytelling, it’s very mature in the sense that it’s very subtle in what it’s saying about adult relationships and some of the complexities thereof.
Robot Dreams of way more than just electric sheep.
7 times because of years of drinking I have absolutely no idea as to what happened on that 21st night of September, your Honour out of 10
--
“Do you remember
The 21st night of September?
Love was changin' the minds of pretenders
While chasin' the clouds away” – they don’t write them liked they used to, thank fuck - Robot Dreams
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