DOG DAYS

ROBOT DREAMS Pablo Berger’s animated ‘silent’ movie brings the noise.

‘Dog’ and his new robot pal get acquainted

The film of Robot Dreams is like a lasagne,’ announces its Spanish director, Pablo Berger. ‘There are different layers.’ It’s a fair point. Adapted from the hit 2007 graphic novel by Sara Varon, this tale of a dog who builds and befriends a robot can easily be enjoyed, Pixar style, by all types of filmgoers. ‘I would love to think that Robot Dreams caters something to different audiences,’ adds Berger, when Teasers meets with him in London. ‘I would love to have in the same screening room kids, cinephiles, critics, casual film viewers.’

The film marks Berger’s first animated project following three live-action features, including 2017’s Abracadabra, and he certainly approached it from a movie buff’s perspective.

With no dialogue in the film, he created a silent movie inspired by Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and, most of all, Charlie Chaplin. ‘What [Chaplin] did with City Lights… it was already 1931, the sound era had started. But he wanted to tell a complex story only using visual storytelling. So in that sense, we were always watching his film while we were preparing this film.’

After gaining the rights from Varon in 2018, Berger was given ‘carte blanche’ from the author to do as he wished with the adaptation. One of the major changes was to clarify the setting – in the book, just an anonymous urban conurbation occupied by animals as if they were humans. ‘In the book, the protagonists were Robot and Dog,’ he says. ‘And in the film, the protagonists are Robot, Dog and New York. This is something I brought to the adaptation – New York will be a third protagonist.’

‘In the film, the protagonists are Robot, Dog and New York’

PABLO BERGER

All through, Berger wanted to keep the spirit of the book alive, especially when the story’s canine protagonist gets separated from his new robot chum and must scheme a way to retrieve him. ‘I think it’s not like a children’s book, where everybody’s happy and everybody’s good. It’s closer to real life. I think that somehow, in the last two decades, especially the last decade, children’s films, they’ve been too sweet and too far away from real life. That’s what this film was made for.’

With two ‘pop-up’ studios set up in Spain, an estimated 130 animators worked on the project, in person.

‘I went there for two years, every day meeting with the director of animation, with animators,’ explains Berger. ‘So for me it was something very different from what I have experienced as a director.’ Using old-school, handdrawn techniques, ‘we wanted to make the best possible 2D animation,’ he adds. And if they ever got stuck? They looked to Japan and the work of Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki for inspiration. ‘We’d always say, “What would Miyazaki do with this problem?”’

ROBOT DREAMS OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 22 MARCH.