Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger): This is how Robot Dreams was made, from the role to the Oscar

2024-01-27 23:28:34

Sunday, January 28, 2024, 00:28

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In the fifth draft of the ‘Robot Dreams’ script that PabloBerger gave to José Luis Ágreda – dated January 2019 –, the Bilbao director drew a megaphone like the one on the ‘Torremolinos 73’ poster and an exclamation: «Bergman used to say that José Luis Ágreda is the best art director in the world. It’s true!”.

That stack of pages held together with a clip housed a dream that has kept its author in suspense for five years, without giving up, inspiring some collaborators who blindly trust in the man who won ten Goyas with ‘Snow White’, a silent film in black and white. Now, Berger wanted a cartoon movie starring a dog and a robot. Without a single dialogue.

Each ‘Robot Dreams’ scenario has been designed to recreate different types of lighting. Courtesy of José Luis Ágreda – Art Director

A ‘bilbainada’ that was released at the most relevant film festival in the world, Cannes, was the best animated film at the European Film Awards, aspires to four Goyas and on March 10 it can culminate its feat with the first Oscar for Spanish animation. “An Oscar nomination is a producer’s dream come true, something indelible on your resume that marks a before and after,” acknowledges producer Sandra Tapia. “If awards are useful for anything, beyond the rush, it is to give visibility, especially if they are films as authorial and pure as this one.”

«An Oscar nomination is a producer’s dream come true, something indelible on your resume that marks a before and after»

Sandra Tapia

Producer of ‘Robot Dreams’

‘Robot Dreams’ is still showing in Spain, it has been released in France and will do so promptly in all territories. «But the most important thing is that the Oscar reaches the public; If someone didn’t have the film located, now they know they have to see it,” adds the partner of the Barcelona production company Arcadia, whose logo appears in Berger’s two previous films, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Abracadabra’.

Who hasn’t celebrated friendship by taking a booth photo? Courtesy of José Luis Ágreda – Art Director

And it all started thanks to a scholarship from the Bizkaia Provincial Council: the one that led Pablo Berger in 1990 to leave his job as a computer engineer at Arthur Andersen to go to New York to study film.

The happy decade he spent in the city of skyscrapers was resurrected when, true to his penchant for buying comics without dialogue, he read ‘Robot Dreams’ by Sara Varon, set in that era. «The story caught me and the ending moved me. Surprisingly, the protagonists were a dog and a robot and the rest were anthropomorphic beings. But they had a wonderful truth and tenderness.

«The Oscar reaches the public. If someone didn’t have the movie located, now they know they have to see it »

Sandra Tapia

Producer of ‘Robot Dreams’

Berger met Tapia in his ‘camarote’, as he calls his office on San Bernardo Street in Madrid. «Pablo usually carries out his projects with great secrecy, he does not share them until they are very advanced. He believed that he was going to present me with a musical. When I saw that it was a 2D animated film I thought: great, there are no actors. The production company that received the Goya for ‘As bestas’ believes that Berger is a perfect director for animation: “he always draws the storyboard of everything he wants to film, he shoots everything he has drawn and edits everything he has created.” rolled.”

The characters of ‘Robot Dreams’ are drawn in different positions. Displaying them as a sequence produces the animation. Courtesy of José Luis Ágreda – Art Director

And we come to Bergman’s favorite art director, José Luis Ágreda (just kidding). The Sevillian illustrator and cartoonist lived in Bilbao from the age of 4 to 18. His brother was part of the comics gang of Álex de la Iglesia, Biaffra, Iñigo Rotaetxe… «I don’t remember, but I’m sure I coincided with Pablo in some cycle of Buster Keaton or Hitchcock in the Museum’s Cinematheque,” ventures the author of the ‘storyboard’.

Ágreda has provided the necessary visual tools to tell the film in the way the director wants: style, color, light, tone, character design… He also coordinated the team of 200 artists in studios in Madrid and Pamplona, ​​busy during two years in the most intense phase of production. “The director of an animated film may not know how to draw,” he explains. «Pablo has not made the ‘stories’, but he has a very great visual culture. He gave me references from comic book authors until we found the style, which is like Sara Varon’s but hypervitaminated.

Places like the island of Manhattan, with its Central Park and Seventh Avenue have been recreated in detail and adjusting to what they were like in the years in which the story takes place. Courtesy of José Luis Ágreda – Art Director

Berger’s wife and creative accomplice, Yuko Harami, provided the necessary documentation to recreate the New York of the time, although the name of the city never appears in the film. A street corner, a telephone model, a ketchup bottle… “We rigorously reflect a real and concrete world that helps the viewer get into the story,” Ágreda boasts. A diverse fauna of extras reflects multicultural New York. The fact that the protagonists are a dog and a genderless robot helps their friendship story can also be interpreted as a couple’s love.

«We rigorously reflect a real and concrete world that helps the viewer get into the story»

José Luis Ágreda

Art Director of ‘Robot Dreams’

“The difference with Disney-Pixar’s ‘Elemental’, which cost 200 million euros compared to 5 and a half for ‘Robot Dreams’, is the creative freedom,” says José Luis Ágreda. «The producers here are not so worried. This is a handmade film, in which the hand of each artist counts. A film by Pablo, which allows the rest of us artists to play with his toy.

Co-produced with France, ‘Robot Dreams’ was already sold worldwide before being screened at Cannes. The distributor Neon, which won four Oscars for ‘Parasites’, will release it in the US in the spring. In Japan it will be seen in autumn and will be accompanied by merchandising. “We don’t have the voices of famous actors to advertise it, but in exchange we don’t have to dub it in the countries where it is released,” consoles Sandra Tapia, who does not reveal the amount of money that had to be paid for the rights to ‘September’, the song by Earth, Wind & Fire that sounds like a leitmotif. The second verse quotes September 21, the day Berger and Harami’s daughter Aiko was born.

Robot Dreams: el trailer

‘Robot Dreams’ is a wonderful example of traditional, almost artisanal animation, which is not abundant today. For this reason, it is running as a candidate, although with very powerful rivals (Disney/Pixar or the master Miyazaki) for the Oscar for best animated film. We will have to wait for the awards ceremony at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on March 10 to know for sure, but… what do you think? Do you think this work by a man from Bilbao will win the statuette?

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