Animation feature film “Robot Dreams”, which recently got nominated for Best Animation Film Oscar, is sweet and touching with its charming style and heartfelt storytelling. While drawing your attention for its colorful background at first, the movie simply follows its modest but poignant story of friendship and relationship, but the result is unexpectedly sublime and poignant with some surprising emotional complexity, and I was deeply moved in addition to having lots of amused smiles during my viewing.

The story of the film is set in a fantasy version of New York City during the 1980s, which is incidentally populated with many different kinds of anthropomorphic animal figures not so far from those similar ones in Oscar-winning animation film “Zootopia” (2016). At first, we are introduced a canine character who is simply named “Dog”, and the film observes how this canine dude is merely going through another usual day of his in his apartment as mindlessly watching TV alone.

And then Dog happens to pay attention to a TV commercial advertising a new brand of robot as a possible companion. Without any hesitation, Dog, who seems to be male as far as I observe from the film, picks up the phone for ordering it, and his ordered robot is soon delivered, though he needs a lot of time for assembling its many different parts together just like we usually need many hours for assembling those IKEA products.

Once everything is fully assembled together and then Dog turns on its power switch, Robot eventually comes alive, and what follows next is a series of funny and heart-warming moments coming from their growing friendship. Although it is sometimes too naïve and innocent to our little amusement, Robot gradually becomes a best friend for Dog, and they come to spend time together here and there around the city. At one point, they go to a big public park not so different from the Central Park of New York City, and they have a lovely and fantastic moment as they try roller-skating with Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic pop song “September” being played on the soundtrack.

However, something unfortunate happens when they go to the beach outside the city. After Robot and Dog play and rest together on the beach for a while, Dog belatedly discovers that Robot becomes too rusty to move for itself, and there is really nothing Dog can do for now. After reluctantly leaving Robot on the beach for the following night, Dog hurriedly comes back to the beach on the very next day, but, alas, the beach is closed, and he cannot enter the beach until the first day of next June.

What follows next is Dog’s desperate attempts to retrieve and then repair Robot, all of which are failed in one way or another to his frustration. In the end, he has no choice but to wait till the opening day of the beach in next year, and he promises to himself that he will never forget his friend before the day eventually comes.

However, Dog often gets his mind distracted by one thing after another as next several months pass by. He later comes across a supposedly female animal figure, and it looks like for a while that he may be more serious his unexpected relationship with this figure. In the middle of the winter season, he decides to try something new for him, so he goes to a ski resort, and that leads to one of the most hilarious moments in the film.

Meanwhile, the story also focuses on what is happening around and inside Robot. While it remains stuck at the same spot in the beach as before, a series of incidents happen to it, and its robotic mind also goes through a number of imaginative moments as it keeps yearning for the reunion with Dog day by day. At one point, it comes to have a cheerful dream sequence clearly influenced by a certain famous Hollywood musical fantasy film, and we are alternatively amused and touched by that.

All these and many other memorable scenes in the film are effectively presented by its broad but distinctive animation style, and you will be more amazed to see how director/writer/co-producer Pablo Berger and his crew members deftly and effortlessly pull out genuine emotions from the process. The film, which is based on the graphic novel of the same name by American cartoonist Sara Varon, merely depends on a limited number of facial expressions without using any dialogue at all, but the overall result vividly and palpably conveys to us a various range of emotions inside its two main characters, and that is why we can clearly sense and understand the emotionally complex aspects of its bittersweet but ultimately optimistic finale.

On the whole, “Robot Dreams” is one of more interesting animation films which came out in last year, which was a curiously disappointing year for animation films. While we had a couple of big highlights via “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (2023) and “The Boy and the Heron” (2023), there were actually not many animation films good enough to entertain and mesmerize us during last year, and we also had to endure “Migration” (2023) and “Wish” (2023) around the end of last year. In my trivial opinion, “Robot Dream” is a much better alternative to “Migration” or “Wish” for any audience out there, and I sincerely recommend you to check out this little gem as soon as possible.