Metacritic reviews

With its soulful tin heart, Robot Dreams moves us to appreciate the fortune of having a precious pal. Whether for a season or a lifetime.

Who needs humans? This is visual storytelling at its finest, a traditional animation of gentle, unshowy genius. Sometimes the very best love stories go deeper than words can say.

Its radical sweetness arises from a wellspring of empathy. Its radiant colors and lucid conception of vulnerability in the face of a largely inconsiderate world, sink deep beneath the skin in the liminal space between the soul and the heart that can make animation such a wondrous medium. Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is its stunning reality.

Robot Dreams—as much a movie about coupledom as it is about friendship—sneaks up on you with an ending that both eulogizes the ones that got away and celebrates the memories that they had left behind.

Robot Dreams is one of the best films of the year, animated or otherwise.

Robot Dreams may be sentimental, but it is also wise, resisting the urge to craft the sort of crowd-pleasing happy ending one might expect. Rather, Berger goes for something truer.

Berger doesn’t make concessions for the easily teary: Robot Dreams is a film as much about separation as togetherness. But while the final reel is a low-key heartbreaker, the bubble never pops on the loveliness of what came before.

Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.

The use of music and sound design is very thoughtful throughout, capturing the way music by street performers makes life in the city feel like a musical all the time while the murmur of traffic and general hubbub creates its own atonal backing track.

This is a sweet, fuzzy movie, possibly a little soft-hearted. Still, I dare anyone to watch the final moments without a lump in the throat.