Robot Dreams

Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams is the Spanish director's first animated feature after a career of acclaimed live-action films including Blancanieves and Torremolinos 73. Adapted from Sara Varon's wordless 2007 graphic novel of the same name, it is animated entirely without dialogue, in 2D, by the studios Arcadia Motion Pictures and Lokiz Films in Madrid and Pamplona, with French co-production from Les Films du Worso.

The film won Best Animated Film at the 36th European Film Awards in late 2023 and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2024, only the third Spanish animated film ever nominated in that category, after Chico & Rita and Klaus. It also won Best Animated Feature at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2023, the most important prize in the European animation calendar.

The score is by Alfonso de Vilallonga, with the recurring use of Earth, Wind & Fire's September as a musical motif that has since become inseparable from the film's reputation. Berger has said the choice of New York rather than a generic city was deliberate, the film is, among other things, an outsider's love letter to 1980s East Village geography. It is regularly cited alongside Wolfwalkers, Flee and The Boy and the Heron as part of the wave of European-inflected animation that has expanded the form's possibilities for adult audiences in the 2020s.