Robot Dreams’ director founded an animation studio just to adapt a graphic novel he loved

polygon.com:

In 2018, when director Pablo Berger was thinking about his next movie, he happened to crack open one of his favorite graphic novels, a short, wordless story about a dog and a robot, best friends who are separated and drift apart. Berger had read Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams before, but the reread caught him off guard.

“This time, when I got to the end of the book, that last act, I was so moved by the story, it brought me truly to tears,” Berger told Polygon in an interview ahead of the film’s limited theatrical release. “I was so shaken by the story. Right there at that moment, I thought there was something very special about the book. That’s when I decided to adapt it and make an animated film — even if it was something new for me.”

Varon’s book is a surprisingly poignant look at the ephemeral nature of friendships, and Berger was determined to capture that in his movie. He’d written and directed three celebrated, successful live-action feature films — Torremolinos 73, Abracadabra, and Spain’s 2012 Academy Award submission, Blancanieves. But making an animated movie would be different. Very different.

“I was truly very frightened about starting the production,” he says. “But I like challenges. It didn’t block me. It really excited me, the fact that it was something new.”

But despite his lack of experience, Berger’s Robot Dreams captures the book’s surprising poignancy, while using the extra space of a feature-length film to expand on its central relationships. It’s set in 1980s New York City, in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals. When one of them, Dog, feels lonely and isolated, he orders a robot companion. And after a whirlwind summer together, bonding over Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” they become best friends.

But an outing to Coney Island leaves Robot powered down and stranded on the beach, and when Dog returns to rescue him, he finds the beach closed for the rest of the year. The remainder of the movie follows what happens to the two of them in