Robot Dreams director Pablo Berger on making Oscar-nominated animated film without words

Director Pablo Berger ‘never planned’ to make an animated movie, until Sara Varon’s graphic novel left him misty-eyed

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A still from Robot Dreams, directed by Pablo Berger. The Spaniard opens up about adapting his animated movie from the tear-jerking graphic novel of the same name, and why it’s too close to real life to be a children’s film.

Published: 4:15am, 6 Jun 2024Updated: 5:48am, 6 Jun 2024

When Pablo Berger began work on Robot Dreams, his first animated film as a director, he looked to a major source of inspiration: Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki.

“We’d always say, ‘What would Miyazaki do with this problem?’”

It is a fair question, given the Japanese legend has been such an influence on animators everywhere over the years. Aptly, Robot Dreams was in the running for the best animated feature Oscar in this year’s awards, eventually losing out to Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.

The story of a dog who builds and befriends a robot, adapted from a hit 2007 graphic novel by Sara Varon, is Berger’s first animated film, and follows three live-action films he has directed. The book first caught his eye in 2010.

“I collect ‘no words’ books […] children’s books that have no words,” he says. “After 20 pages […] I realised this was an adult graphic novel.”

Certainly, Varon’s work feels in step with the current movement in cinema; at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the feline-driven Flow and the Auschwitz story The Most Precious of Cargoes showed that adult animations are in vogue again.