Oscar-Nominated Robot Dreams Is a Gentle Animated Love Story About Dogs, Robots, and 1980s New York

A charming story of love, friendship, and impersonal urban bureaucracy.

There's a well-known saying about finding connection in the nation's capital city: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Robot Dreams, a new animated film that is up for this year's Academy Award for best animated feature, proposes a sort of twist on that idea. What if you are a dog? And you live in New York City? But you still want a friend.

Well then. Maybe the answer is to get a robot.

Robot Dreams is a whimsical, wordless story set in a fantasy version of early 1980s New York in which every person is an animal. It follows Dog, a lonely apartment dweller in the East Village who spends his days playing Pong and watching television, as he purchases a mail-order robot who quickly becomes his best and closest friend. But after a swim on a day trip to the beach, Robot becomes inoperable. Dog is forced to leave Robot on the beach for the long winter, when the beach is closed. What will he do without his best friend?

The answer, it turns out, is that he'll have to find a new friend—perhaps in the form of Duck, a pretty, sporty pal he meets flying kites in Central Park, or perhaps in the form of a new Palbot, one who isn't the same as his old Robot, but who offers a different form of companionship. Robot, meanwhile, spends the winter on the beach, dreaming of Dog, and hoping for a way to escape his strange entrapment.

Robot Dreams is a tale of love and friendship, and it is decidedly sweet-natured without being sentimental. The story's indie comic roots—it was adapted from a 2007 comic of the same name—are obvious: More than most animated films, it captures the distinctive, quirky sensibility of hand-drawn, indie comic line work.

That gives the central story an affable, fablelike quality. It also allows for a level of environmental and period specificity that is rare in any sort of film, animated or otherwise. The movie's early 1980s NYC setting is rendered in pointillistic detail, with intricate sign work and gritty city blocks populated by animal versions of New York street characters.

That includes the city's difficult, impersonal bureaucracy: One reason Dog can't rescue Robot from the beach is that there's a grumpy NYPD officer who refuses to let him through the locked gate onto the sand. Dog visits the city courthouse to plead his case, but his application for a special winter visit to the beach is quickly denied. There's a layered, lived-in quality that even the busiest Pixar movies and the most precisely recreated historical live-action films lack.

The contrast between the ordinariness of the scenario, the unconventional intricacy of the animation, and the fantastical animal characters gives the movie a peculiarity and a particularity that keeps the low-key sweetness afloat. There's magic in the mundanity of it all, which, come to think of it, is how love and friendship work too.