A lonely dog, without friends, without family. The desperate feeling of having someone to share hot dogs and video games with. A robot that suddenly becomes the greatest friend, the most human in a metropolitan world of anthropomorphic animals, including percussionist octopuses, courier bulls and crocodile teachers, where dogs are called Dog and robots are called Robots.
With a sweetness disarming Pablo Berger creates an animated work without dialogue made of thick lines and colored solids, that clean and clear style defined as "clear line" and made popular by Hergé with his beloved Adventures of Tintin. The straight line of a drawn mouth that only by flexing can give shape to the infinite variability of emotional expressions (and even teach a bird to fly in one of the most touching scenes of the film).
After a captivating television advertisement (“Are you looking for a friend?”) Dog buys a robot as a metallic pet, produced by the Berger Corporation (obviously not a casual reference), articulated, flexible, plastilinear, extendable in space and emotions, a Bender of Futurama to its extreme character opposite. What similarly happened in the live action fiction of the recent and very human Brian and Charles, the story of a deep friendship how desperate, as well as lost, between a depressed man and a living robot, in that case assembled with household junk, a washing machine as a chest and a mannequin head as a face. Charles had an avid passion for cabbage, Robot an endless curiosity about the world, which he constantly fills with his big smile. Ice creams in company, skating in the green park of Manhattan, the slow romantic stroll hand in hand: against the backdrop of the Eighties, Dog's previously expressionless face now lights up with happiness, in a synchronized dance of vital (for us) nostalgic music.< 13>

But the idyll between Dog and Robot, the perfect fairy tale in the anthropomorphic imagination of the canine-tinged American dream, is suddenly confronted with the harshest reality: the slow rusting of the shining metal after Robot he threw himself into a whirling and acrobatic dive into the ocean sea, thus remaining immobile with stiff and heavy joints, lying on the beach which had been inaccessible since that day due to the end of the bathing season. Dog's criminal attempts to violate and free her, to go beyond the gates and barbed wire that mark the beginning of the harshest winter, are useless.

Time passes, to the rhythm of melancholic jazz music, and the friendship that seemed indestructible begins to live on dreaming of her rather than being her, due to the distance, due to the inevitable separation. Petrified robot dreams (with open eyes) the impossible to escape from the immobility of his rust, to break the improbable with the possible, in a true phantasmagoric compendium of dreams, in short doing what reality no longer allows him: dances with daisies, Olympic leaps, absurd saving encounters. Each dream always ends with Robot ringing Dog's intercom to find him, but then he wakes up. “It's just a dream” or rather “unfortunately it's just a dream”. Those dreams of hot metal that manage to survive (and make people survive) even the most extreme frost. But even fairy tales end and the season of disillusioned nightmares peeks out under the pillow. With the idea of ​​becoming even more alone for not having been so until the moment before, with the same destabilizing and nihilistic outcome of the void of Bojack Horseman, the same anthropomorphic animals that in a cinematic metropolis lose the sense of 'to be such. A metropolis, like all metropolises, where excess, overpopulation, over-socialization strands bodies in the void, without ever allowing us to really get to know someone. A jungle of visions and sounds, a rainbow of pop energy, where you still manage to feel alone and lost, even when you're with others. Where meetings fade like the seasons, friends melt or fly away, the bitterness of a plural becomes singular.

Letting go, letting go, so that the rust does not attack our hearts too .

From Il Buio In Sala - Report of the 41st Torino Film Festival (2023) < 3>