My Robot Friend, Spain’s surprise Oscar nominee

The first animated film by Spanish director Pablo Berger aims to make a splash on March 10th at the Oscars, after having been a hit in the European awards season, to win the trophy for best animated film from Disney/Pixar, Netflix, Hayao Miyazaki and The Spider-Verse of Spider-Man.

This little gem without dialogue, a skill that the director had demonstrated more than ten years ago in his black and white adaptation Snow White to the Spanish Civil War, centers on the relationship of a lonely dog ​​who decides to buy a robot to keep him company.

The director decides to combine, in this sort of “bromance” (subgenre of male comedy on the boundaries of friendship and platonic love), the animal known as “man’s best friend” with the machine used to describe the people without feelings. , here eloquently titled Dog and Robot, and thus underlines the universality of his relationship story, beyond its anchoring in 1980s New York.

Berger highlights a certain aggressiveness of the New York streets of the past, even as he provides some hints of future gentrification, and initially uses the Twin Towers as an allegory for the tragedy and reconstruction to come. My robot friend is a film that traces, through the four seasons of the year, loneliness, the building of bonds, the separation that implies the return to solitude (a new, more desolate one, which comes after a loss) and the creation of new bonds, after several setbacks on a bumpy road.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Berger’s film is that most of the narrative focuses on the stumbles that Robot and Dog have after the forced separation they suffer from and their constant dreams of reunion. My robot friend feels drawn out by that repetition, beyond the fact that the director creates some brilliant gags and takes the opportunity to wink at the choreography of The Wizard of OzBuster Keaton, Charles Chaplin and even Jacques Tati.

The children, perhaps disoriented

The eye-catching animation, inspired by Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel, looks sort of BoJack Knight, full of anthropomorphic animals, but in a candid and sensitive version, suitable for all audiences, as if it were a children’s comic by Liniers. The curious thing is that children might feel slightly disoriented because they are unable to process the melancholy that invades them My robot friend.

The disco anthem earth, wind and fire September serves as a leitmotif and, although at first it seems to barely evoke the time of year in which Dog and Robot decide to undertake a fateful trip to the beach of Coney Island, it quickly transforms, thanks to its unforgettable lyrics Do you remember…in a hymn to nostalgia.

Pablo Berger gives Dog and Robot a long-awaited happy ending, but different from the usual one in children’s animations that come out. My robot friend it subverts the traditional “happily ever after” into a much healthier and more real “you can always be happy”.

“My Robot Friend”

Animation. Spain/France, 2023. Original titlehe: “Robots dreams”. 103′. ATP. Address: Pablo Berger. Rooms: Hoyts Abasto, Cinemark Palermo, Multiplex Belgrano, Cinépolis Recoleta, Showcase Norcenter.