Robot Dreams: How Pablo Berger created the most soulful tin man since The Wizard of Oz

From David Wiesner’s Sector 7 to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, wordless picture books have become one of this century’s most cherished literary subgenres. Pablo Berger, the acclaimed Basque director of Blancanieves, has long been a big fan.

“When my daughter was two or three I wanted to share my love of books,” Berger says. “I could read the wordless books with her and she could read them by herself. So I started a collection.”

Robot Dreams, Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel depicting the friendship between a dog and a robot in New York in 1984, was an early wordless favourite for the film-maker. Revisiting the book almost a decade later, Berger decided he had to adapt it for the screen.

“I was in tears at the end,” he says. “That’s how much it moved me. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me dream. I loved the simple graphic style. I loved the humour. But what stayed with me was the story of the friendship. It’s so simple. And the designs are so simple. It could be interpreted in many ways. I never wanted to make an animated film. I’m a live-action director. But this hit me so hard.”

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Last week Berger found himself at the Oscars, his film nominated alongside The Boy and the Heron, from the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, as best animated feature. (Miyazaki was not present, but he was triumphant.) It was hardly a level playing field. Berger’s unmissable adaptation of Robot Dreams, a huge crowd-pleaser at Cannes 2023, was completed for about €5.5 million; his Academy Award rivals included Pixar’s Elemental (budgeted at a reported €180 million) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (budgeted at a reported $135 million).

Berger’s plucky contender is far more affecting than those expensive competitors.

In Robot Dreams, Dog lives alone in Manhattan. One night, while flicking through TV channels – zipping past MTV during its golden age – he happens upon an advertisement for a DIY robot friend. After some assembly, Dog and Robot take to the streets on roller skates to the strains of the Earth, Wind & Fire track September.

It’s a significant musical choice; Berger’s musical editor is his wife and long-time collaborator, Yuko Harami; their daughter, who inspired Berger’s wordless-book collection, was born on the date – “the 21st night of September” – immortalised by the song.

The seasons are gorgeously marked: Central Park in spring, Coney Island in summer and the Catskills in the autumn. These details were important for Berger, who completed his master’s in film at New York University in the early 1990s. The period detail is exquisitely exact. The film’s sound designer, Fabiola Ordoyo, scoured old sound libraries to re-create contemporaneous New York audio. Its art director, José Luis Ágreda, who previously collaborated with Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon, worked on intricate backgrounds, lighting design and camera angles.

“Every single object was important,” says Berger. “We looked for photographs from eBay and Google Images and also 1980s New York movies like Ghostbusters. We looked at graffiti. The sound was even more important. Everybody knows how loud the city is. When I was living there New York was the cultural capital of the world. I wanted to re-create the city from that time, before globalisation and gentrification took away its peculiarities.”

Berger and his team also looked to Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata of Studio Ghibli, to Charlie Chaplin and to Jacques Tati to create their all-ages dialogue-free masterpiece. The director has form in this respect. For the matador-themed, monochrome Blancanieves, in 2012, he reimagined Snow White as a silent-movie heroine in a film that relied on the intertitles of its 1920s setting.

“I’m very comfortable without dialogue,” says Berger. “Before I was a director I was a spectator. I love cinema. Some of my favourite films of the last two decades are animated films. I Lost My Body. The Secret of Kells. Persepolis. In the US I love many Pixar films. When we had doubts about any scene we’d ask: what would Miyazaki do? Or how would Chaplin direct this?”

Berger’s first film was the alien-invasion short Mama, from 1988, which earned him a scholarship to pursue directing in New York. While he was in the US he directed the Emmy-nominated short Truth and Beauty while teaching classes at New York Film Academy, Cambridge, Princeton and Yale.

He returned to Spain to make Torremolinos 73, a hit comedy about a 1970s encyclopedia salesman attempting to make a porn film. Blancanieves, which was his second feature, won 10 Goya awards, including for best film and director. None of his films look like the others, yet, when it came to Robot Dreams, animation was not as alien as it might have been.

“My previous films were good preparation to make this film,” says Berger. “I’ve always worked with very detailed storyboards. I spent a year on the storyboards for Abracadabra, my last film. I like to write in images. That’s how I approach storytelling. But when I came to the challenges of animation, I asked myself: ‘What can I bring as a live-action director?’ And the answer was that I love to work with actors. That’s my strength. And sometimes in animation the characters overact. If they are sad they have sad faces. I wanted to make something that would look like it would with actors. I directed it like I would with actors.”

The results have generated some of the most ecstatic reviews of the past year. Most affectingly, Robot Dreams features the most soulful and memorable screen tin man since Dorothy skipped down the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz.

“The conversations I have with audiences are amazing,” says Berger. “Some people talk about first love or a loved one who has passed away. Some people think it’s a gay story. AI is the topic of the year, and that comes up too. It’s so open to interpretation. From my side, the robot is a metaphor. He’s the ideal friend. He’ll do anything for you without asking for anything in exchange. He’ll always be there for you. He’s basic and mechanical, but he’s more human than any human.”

Robot Dreams opens in cinemas on Friday, March 22nd