Robot Dreams (Movie)

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    Lovable Movie Robots Are Coming to Charm Your Children

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    The adult world is ever more full of robots. Children’s entertainment feels as if it’s working hard to make them seem adorable.One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know.The robots in our fictions used to be more sinister. Our notion of artificial life has included the bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner,” the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one that wages war on its makers in the “Terminator” movies. Long before that, we had Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel and the golem in some versions of 17th-century Jewish folklore. These were often stories of hubris, of humanity’s inability to think through all that we were setting loose: Synthetic life was constantly breaking away from its creators’ grasp and committing heinous, forbidden acts. Even when the characters were more abstruse, operating beyond the ken of the people they manipulated — like the artificial intelligence Wintermute in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” — they were, in some sense, gods that we mortals unleashed on the world and then struggled to control.This hasn’t entirely changed. We still enjoy stories about malevolent machines, like the homicidal A.I. doll in “M3gan.” With other fictional robots, it’s not clear if they’re dangerous or merely hapless: Look to “Sunny,” recently on Apple TV+, in which a human protagonist spends most of the series trying to determine if she can trust the upbeat, bumbling homebot left to her by her roboticist husband. That kind of fear and suspicion, though, has mainly been reserved for adults. Children are offered a far more optimistic view — one that has lately seemed to go well beyond the endearing robots of the past, like R2-D2 and BB-8 in the “Star Wars” films, or the Iron Giant, or Sox in “Lightyear.”Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming.Or consider “Robot Dreams,” an animated feature by Pablo Berger that came out earlier this year. Based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it is set in a version of 1980s New York inhabited by humanlike animals who can, among other things, order build-your-own-robot kits advertised on late-night television. This film, with its theme of loneliness and its surprisingly mature depiction of how relationships change, might be better for slightly older children: It follows a dog and its robot companion as they grow close and then are driven apart, exploring the ways that love can evolve over time. But near the end, it is the robot, not the anthropomorphic dog who built it, that has to make a heartbreakingly human decision.This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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      Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.Critic’s PickA wordless cartoon to love.The happy dog-robot pair in the animated film “Robot Dreams.”Arcadia Motion Pictures, Lokiz Films, Noodles Production, Les Films du Worso‘Robot Dreams’A dog and his robot friend explore 1980s New York in this wordless cartoon written and directed by Pablo Berger and adapted from the graphic novel of the same name.From our review:It’s marvelous how the film is able to sketch so much soul from such simple lines. The characters are drawn bluntly, just as they are in the book. Yet Berger, directing his first animated feature (but not his first silent film), already boasts the creativity of a master. He frames images from inside a grimy microwave, or looking up from the bottom of a candy bowl as it’s being filled with jelly beans. One dizzying shot comes from the point of view of a snowman who’s popped off his own head and hurled it like a bowling ball.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe sulking dead.Renate Reinsve in “Handling the Undead.”Pal Ulvik Rokseth/Sundance Institute, via Neon‘Handling the Undead’After the dead are spontaneously reanimated, three families wrestle with the personal ramifications.From our review:Director Thea Hvistendahl wisely takes her time getting to any real action. Instead, with a slow-moving camera and plenty of filtered sunlight, she conjures a dreamlike state, the sense of hanging between planes of existence that tends to accompany those who grieve. There are times when the film veers too near the maudlin for comfort, but it always finds its way back to something spare and meaningful. What would you do, the story gently asks, if your fondest and most impossible wish was granted, and you realized it wasn’t at all what you’d hoped it would be?In theaters. Read the full review.Swimming with the clichés.Daisy Ridley as the real-life competitive swimmer Trudy Ederle in “Young Woman and the Sea.”Vladisav Lepoev/Disney‘Young Woman and the Sea’This Disney drama is inspired by the true story of Trudy Ederle (played by Daisy Ridley), who in 1926 battled sexism and became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.From our review:This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to. Which is to say, its production values are top-notch, the cast uniformly competent or better (Ridley is particularly winning), and the filmmaking language — the director here is Joachim Ronning, whose last at-bat with Disney was the 2019 critical misfire “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” — is meticulously calculated to deliver a rousing climax and an appropriately heartwarming coda. It’s also rather rich in cliché.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickJessica Lange, stealing the show.Jessica Lange in “The Great Lillian Hall,” with Jesse Williams, standing behind her, reflected in the mirror.HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Robot Dreams’ Review: A Friendship That Is Far From Mechanical

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      This animated film from Pablo Berger is a silent wonder that says everything about love.Decades after Philip K. Dick asked if androids dreamed of electric sheep, we have an answer. This android — one of two nameless leads in the Oscar-nominated charmer “Robot Dreams” — envisions a small, lonely dog in his third-floor walk-up, microwaving a depressing dinner for one. Set in 1980s Manhattan, Pablo Berger’s all-ages, wordless wonder of a cartoon kicks into gear when the mutt assembles a self-aware, spaghetti-limbed robot companion ordered from an infomercial. You might be thinking that sentient artificial intelligence didn’t exist 40 years ago, and you’d be right. But dogs don’t rent apartments, either.This fanciful vision of New York is populated by animals: sporty ducks, punk rock monkeys, buffalo mail carriers, penguins shouldering boomboxes, and a disproportionate number of llamas. Mechanical beings are sparse and some creatures consider them lower in status, a brutal development when our robot’s relationship with his dog begins to break down. But Berger isn’t interested in science fiction. He’s made a buddy film that’s as relatable as two friends bonding over slices of pizza (but the robot eats the plate, too).Berger, who also adapted the screenplay, expands Sara Varon’s short graphic novel of the same name into a minor epic. To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.It’s hard to make out the dog and robot’s attachment. Is it platonic? Romantic? Does the dog consider himself the robot’s partner or his owner? The leads remain resolutely mute. In their silence, we fill their relationship with our own memories of loved ones, present and past: partners, best friends, siblings, even long-lost pets. The music steers the mood, a mix of Alfonso de Vilallonga’s jazzy score and a track by Earth, Wind & Fire that’s heard in endless permutations from the full original to a stripped-down, jaunty whistle, like that gag about a butcher who uses everything but the oink.The film is structured as a series of vignettes. Some are designed to break your heart; others exist just because. In a low moment, the robot imagines himself taking the place of the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” which he and the dog rented on VHS from Kim’s Video. His dreamscape, however, squeezes the Empire State Building and the twin towers into Emerald City’s skyline, and on his yellow brick stroll there, he’s engulfed by giant, dancing flowers who stomp their stems at him in choreography that’s Busby Berkeley by way of Riverdance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival Preview

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      A range of films, many of them animated, some hilarious, some serious, bubble up at this year’s festival in New York, where kids can vote for awards.One of the cinematic highlights of the 2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival could be described, at least partly, as a wild-goose chase. Or, more precisely, a domestic-hen chase.That animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!,” follows a guilt-stricken single mother trying to buy the main ingredient of her daughter’s favorite dish. But since grocers are on strike in their French city, the desperate mother steals a live hen. The bird flees from her car’s trunk to a watermelon truck to the space behind an armoire, with adults and children, including the high-spirited young daughter, Linda, in hot pursuit.A simple farce? Not exactly. The film, by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, also includes time shifts, a singing ghost, an exploration of memory and multiple references to death — that of Louis XVI and Linda’s beloved father, as well as the chicken’s potential demise. Done in loose, almost abstract animation, the movie, which is billed as the festival’s “centerpiece spotlight,” is about as far as an audience can get from typical commercial children’s fare.It is also exactly the kind of unusual work to expect at the festival, which begins on Saturday and continues on weekends through March 17 with a slate of 18 feature presentations and more than 70 short films. About three-quarters of those titles are animated.“I think when you see live action, you’re very enraptured with someone else’s story,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But with animation, she added, “you’re very excited also about your own, because I think you’re paying attention to the medium, you’re paying attention to the way that artists are using different techniques and different storytelling approaches. That really forefronts the idea of creativity and possibility.”Villaseñor and Nina Guralnick, the festival’s executive director, did not set out to focus on animation this year, but found that those films were often the most interesting. Ever since the festival’s founding in 1997, it has shown its audience — cinemagoers as young as 3 and as old as 18 — work that they’re unlikely to see anywhere else, including features that have previously been shown almost exclusively at festivals for adults.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More