By Nick Nitkowski

Robot Dreams is a French and Spanish produced animated film about a world of anamorphic animals, like Zootopia, in which a lonely dog purchases a robot friend to accompany him wherever he goes and as they venture together, their bond becomes stronger.

Truth be told, this movie wasn’t even on my radar at first. It wasn’t until I saw that it was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the Oscars this year. That alone was enough to spark my interest and seek this movie out. Now that I’ve finally seen it in its entirety, I can definitely see why this movie was nominated.

Everything from the 2D animation, an animation style I have greatly missed in a world ruled by 3D animation, to the unique method of storytelling, I thought this movie was superb. They even featured a well-known song that has been stuck in my head long after I’ve finished watching the movie.

One of the unique things about this movie is that there is absolutely no dialogue whatsoever in this movie. Normally, this could be a bad thing as I have seen movies before that didn’t have any dialogue and those particular movies were quite a chore to sit through without falling asleep. This film, however, managed to keep my attention the whole way though. The movie is well paced. There’s always something happening and it never feels boring. And since the movie has no dialogue, it is heavily reliant on sounds and I thought the sound choices were very authentic and well selected to create a believable atmosphere.

If I were to search for anything wrong with this movie, it would be this one little thing. In my personal opinion, there was one particular section of the film that I didn’t think need to be there. It felt like it was there strictly to help the film reach its hour and a half runtime mark to be considered a feature film and without it, it probably would have gone under. It’s not a bad segment, it just felt a little unnecessary and it didn’t really contribute to the movie’s overall plot.

Where this movie struck the biggest chord with me was its ending. Without giving any spoilers, it was a bitter sweet ending. I’ve seen people divided on the movie’s ending and how it made them feel. Some people wished for a different ending, but for me, the ending was perfect and it definitely left me in tears. This may not be the same experience for everyone. This is just how I felt about it.

Overall, this was such a great movie. It was great seeing a 2D theatrically released feature film again outside the realm of anime. I really enjoyed how it told its story and I even liked the simplistic character designs. The Oscar nomination was well deserved. This is a movie that I cannot wait to see again and I can chalk it up to my list of movies that made me cry. I highly recommend this movie if you have not seen it already, because this film was certainly a dream.

4 1/2 stars