Robot Dreams review – bittersweet buddy movie is one of the best animations in recent years

A lonely dog buys himself a robot companion and learns to see the world in a joyous new light in Spanish director Pablo Berger’s exquisite, Oscar-nominated film

It’s an almost entirely dialogue-free animation, captured with pleasingly simple, almost naive 2D character design. The warm and disarming storytelling is bolstered by the film’s unassuming use of humour. But come to Robot Dreams well stocked with tissues: Pablo Berger’s exquisite, bittersweet, Oscar-nominated buddy movie about the bond between a dog and a robot matches Spike Jonze’s Her as one of cinema’s most devastating and profound studies of loneliness and the fragility of emotional connections. If any further evidence were needed to support the theory that we are enjoying a new boom time for quality animation, then this is it.

The appealingly clean, uncomplicated character design is based on that of the source material, a graphic novel by American author and illustrator Sara Varon. She has made something of a career from exploring odd-couple relationships: one of her other books, Bake Sale, is about the friendship between a cupcake and an aubergine. Another, Chicken and Cat, is playfully referenced in Robot Dreams, namechecked on the buzzer for the apartment below that of Dog.