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The first two trailers shown before this movie were for Migration, the animation about a family of ducks facing comedy adventures as they fly from New England to Jamaica and Despicable Me 4. These were then followed by the promo for The Teachers’ Lounge, the hard hitting German drama that was recently up for Best International Picture at the Academy Awards. I have to say it was a mixed selection, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve quite seen before.

It’s hard to deny that they weren’t all suitable for the screening though as Robot Dreams is both a funny cartoon about a dog and a robot and a profound foreign film that beautifully examines loss and isolation. Itself nominated for an Oscar in the animated category, I think what it most wants to be is the latter but it easily satisfies both and will appeal to audiences both young and old.

The film is adapted from a graphic novel, a medium that more comfortably uses a common childhood art form to examine grown up concerns, which wordlessly tells of a dog (actually named Dog) who buys a robot as company but then both have to move on when the latter suffers a significant malfunction. The film uses a similar look for the characters and maintains the absence of dialogue but amplifies the humanity among its non-human players. The Oscar it in contention for eventually went to Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron which also beat Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse and Robot Dreams does not push the medium of animation in the same way as either of these. There is beauty in its simplicity though and of the three I think this moved me the most.

The design of the titular fantasising automaton (for the record, at no point does he dream of electric sheep) is great; capturing the classic idea of an android but still having plenty of its own charm. It is interesting that it is broadly humanoid when there are no people in the film (there are in the book), the movie being set in a 1980s New York entirely populated, Zootropolis style, by animals. It actually borrows more than a little from C3-PO, which is referenced in the film in a couple of ways. Anyway, I want its face on a T-shirt please, as soon as possible. I am sure less sci-fi inclined minds might want the dog but I want the bot.

Robot Dreams has quite a wide release but I’m not sure how many viewers will catch this at the cinema. See it if you can though. With Kung Fu Panda and Godzilla x Kong being the Easter Holiday family alternates I would definitely choose this (as I clearly did as I have not seen either of those two others). Rather than the target demographic being confused, as my pre-film programming might have suggested, it is actually wonderfully wide. I am sure children and adults will get very different things from it but this said there are plenty of very young people that know what loneliness and rejection are and I only hope they get the catharsis too.

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The Ripley Factor:

There is actually one significant female character in the film and she’s cool and has a fun loving spirit. It is interesting that she is set up as a potential alternative partner for Dog and while her sex may be irrelevant to this (and her species for that matter, she’s not even a mammal) it does, deliberately or otherwise, examine heteronormativity and gender in companionships. Dog and Robot are most definitely coded male and are clearly better suited to one another. Mind you Dog also pays for Robot so maybe I’m reading too much into the whole thing.