ROBOT DREAMS
****/****
based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon
written and directed by Pablo Berger
THE WILD ROBOT
**/****
screenplay by Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
directed by Chris Sanders
by Walter Chaw Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, an adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel, has about it the sadness and loneliness of Harvey Pekar’s work. Set in a zootopia of anthropomorphic animals that’s actually New York City circa 1984, it’s about a woebegone, chonky grey dog named Dog who resorts to buying a robot for companionship in this cold metropolis. They go on walks, horse around; in an affecting moment, Robot sees lovers holding hands and takes Dog’s paw in his. He grips too hard, Dog pulls away in pain, and then, just before the scene cuts away, Dog reaches out and takes Robot’s hand again. It’s perfectly timed, sentimental but subtle, a gag paid off with a lovely grace note that doesn’t draw attention to itself–that, indeed, could be missed if one weren’t paying attention. They go to the beach together, the introverted Dog and the exuberant, animated Robot, where Dog picks out a quiet spot to put down blankets while Robot does a full back-flop into the water between a group of kids. Dog is horrified by Robot’s audacity, but Robot has won fast friends. Robot is Dog’s social confidence, his fresh outlook on the possibilities life has in store for the bright-eyed and courageously optimistic. Robot is the part of us that has died in most of us, the victim of cruel experience, and the wonder of Robot Dreams is how it doesn’t patronize the viewer with a world that conforms to the sunny expectations of a newborn. After their bucolic day at the beach, Robot rusts solid, and Dog is forced to abandon him on the now-shuttered boardwalk for an entire season.
I thought Robot Dreams would go in one of two directions from there: Either it would descend into syrupy homilies and deathbed farewells, or Dog would take on Robot’s carefree mien, thus carrying on Robot’s legacy, sadder but wiser. The film resists both solutions. Instead, Robot sleeps away the cold months, abandoned, covered with sand, then snow. It dreams of rescue, reunion, even of waking up in Oz and following a yellow brick road–the topic of one of the videocassettes he rented once with his best friend, purchaser, and assembler. Meanwhile, Dog, kept from rescuing his friend by a tall chainlink gate and an overzealous watchman, tries to join organized social groups for outdoor adventures, where he finds himself ostracized and bullied before, finally, making a sweet connection with outdoorsy, good-humoured Duck. Dog and Duck fly a kite, fish, and go for bike rides, and then one day, Duck is gone, and Dog tries to figure out how often he should call before he risks humiliating himself by just showing up at her door. It is custom in the West for animated films to be, for the most part, made for children and, as such, engineered for easy bromides and unearned emotional catharsis. Robot Dreams is an unusually affecting character study of a creature who wasn’t really made for this world finding relief now and again but rarely, and then only briefly. Dog speaks directly to the soul of melancholia. It occurred to me that this film is the perfect analogue to Spike Jonze’s Her, about another sensitive, isolated soul who only ever manages to make a true connection with an intelligence he cultivates…and then loses anyway, because, after all, anything created in his image will by its nature end up alone.
Chris Sanders’s visually arresting but contrived and overtly manipulative The Wild Robot is a standard kid-trauma opera that opens with the death of a goose mother and two of her three eggs, leaving a “runt” named Brightbill (voiced by Kit Connor) as the sole survivor. The murderer is Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a sentient robot capable of adapting to different environments, including learning every animal language on the remote desert island where she’s crash-landed. Roz didn’t mean to kill Brightbill’s family, but she adopts Brightbill and takes on the task of raising him until he’s able to assimilate with the native goose population. The possibilities of tears being jerked aren’t endless with this premise, though they are obvious. There’s the mother/child stuff, the kid discovering he’s adopted, and his realization that his adoptive mother is the reason he’s an orphan in the first place. There’s the runt bit, which leads to bullying; there’s a comic-relief fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) who inevitably reveals a heart of gold, plus a moment of crisis in which our proverbial Rudolph gets to lead the proverbial sleigh to safety.
Damned if The Wild Robot doesn’t whack-a-mole every single heartbreaking separation and heartfelt reunion with machine-like efficiency. I got caught up a time or two, too, in the fact that this literally white servant robot is voiced by a Black actor, making me wonder what kind of owners, exactly, its corporate manufacturers are trying to court. Ultimately, as the story involves an island “off the grid” in a dystopian/utopian future that maintains a healthy ecosystem with alpha predators despite being, like, five square miles in the middle of the ocean, the contortions of the plot are ridiculous enough that all but the youngest members of the audience will likely be asking what the bear is going to eat once the island is reduced to ash and he’s friends with all the prey. It’s slick, is what I’m saying, and as is the nature of slick things, there’s nothing much to hold onto once the ride is over.
