The European Film Awards, held tonight in Berlin, have distinguished Robot dreams, by Pablo Berger, as the best European animated film of 2023, which is about to end. Berger happily came out on stage to collect the award for this emotional story of friendship between an anthropomorphic dog and a robot in the New York of the eighties that dazzled in Cannes, can be seen in cinemas since last December 6 and to which They open up many possibilities for him to enter the Oscar race.
The Spanish director invited the film's producer, Sandra Tapia, to be with him and emphatically recalled a phrase by Guillermo del Toro saying that animation is not a genre, it is cinema. "It's my mantra and I'm not going to stop until the industry treats us as equals." The director of Snow White, who signed his first animated film, dedicated the award to "the creative and vibrant Spanish animation film industry" and encouraged all creators to explore the "endless" opportunities of animation.
The award-winning film tells the story of Dog, a lonely dog who lives in Manhattan in the 80s and who one day decides to build himself a robot, a friend. They become inseparable until an accident forces Dog to abandon Robot on a beach. Robot dreams adapts the graphic novel of the same name by the American Sara Varon, published in 2007. It is silent, following in the footsteps of the award-winning Snow White (2012). Berger came across Varon's comic in 2010 and bought it as a collector of books without words: "I laughed, it surprised me, it seems childish but the point of view is adult and above all it moved me and I was clear that I wanted to make a film" , he explained to this newspaper. "In all my films I seek to excite."
Although it was not clear in the novel that the plot took place in New York, Berger placed it there because it was where he lived for a decade between the 80s and 90s. "It is a love letter to a city that was the center of the world and that has changed a lot, but it marked a fundamental moment in my life. For Sara Varon, the film is "amazing" because "Pablo has maintained the feeling of the book and the appearance of the characters" and she confesses that at first she did not have much hope because previous attempts at collaboration with other directors had not been fruitful.
