Robot Dreams (2023)

The good aspects of this film were that the animation was really beautiful, and with a simple style a lot of emotion was able to be conveyed. In general i enjoyed the plot and the bittersweet ending.

However, i felt that there was a lack of attention to detail in the finished product. Some of these concerns are almost certainly just me. For example, in a film without dialogue, using music with lyrics and writing legible words in the background scenery feels a little sloppy, as my brain gets excited at hearing words and stops paying attention to the plot. Furthermore, having these languages as part of the culture points to the fact that the animals do speak english, in which case the decision to simply hide all dialogue strikes me as a bit weird.

The second issue comes up with pretty much every film with anthropomorphised animals: when going on a date with a duck, why is there a non-anthropomorphised woodpecker in the foreground? When there are farm animals wandering around the city like all the other animals, what are the hotdogs and burgers made of? What do they serve in the “shish kabob” shop?

I’m not opposed to these kind of inconsistencies; our own world is full of them. But to just drop them in with no comment feels lazy, like the filmmakers forgot that burgers are usually made of meat.

On a larger scale, although the plot was nice, the dog protagonist was quite annoying. It seemed that the filmmakers had it in for him too, because when he finally made an attempt to stop sitting at home feeling sorry for himself, he ended up going on a make new friends sledging trip with a bunch of bullies. I’m sure that thing has happened to one or two people, but in this film it only serves to further a narrative that it’s better to make friends with robots than real people who could be mean or let you down by moving to europe, which i can’t get on board with when lonely teenagers replacing human friends with chatbots is actually becoming kind of a big problem.

Anyway. If you don’t look too hard and squint a bit, this film is a perfectly fine way to spend an hour or so.