I saw this on the 18th of March, 2024, at Curzon.
I’m a sucker for this sort of flat, outlined animation style, particularly because it was clearly done well and carefully, not the terrible computer-generated stuff you see in some shows. It’s about a dog and a robot. The dog was lonely, and made the robot to be a friend, but soon the robot rusted up at the beach, and the dog couldn’t get back to it till the next year.
They both spend the year apart: the robot lays on the beach, and experiences his leg being cut off by some rowers, being frozen in the ice, and, in perhaps one of the most beautiful scenes in the film, a small bird making its nest next to it, so he can help raise the three chicks and teach them to fly. Eventually he’s found by a metal detectorist and sold for scrap, and he’s taken apart. However, a hotel handyman finds him, builds him a new body with a speaker system, and they start to work together at the hotel. One sunny day, while making a barbeque on the roof, he looks out of the window, and spots the dog.
The dog, having been thwarted, tried lots of different things. He went skiing with strangers and got injured, he met a girl when flying a kite, went fishing with her, fell in love, and found out she had moved to Europe. He dresses up for Halloween but ends up being scared by the kids. Eventually, he goes back to the beach when it reopens, but finds the robot already gone. After searching fruitlessly, he builds a different robot, and they enjoy their lives together. He’s walking with this new robot when the old robot spots him.
Throughout the movie, there are dream sequences which look like the rest of the movie, but have a different logic and feel to them (it’s masterfully crafted, I don’t know how they did it). The final sequence of the movie shows the robot running after the dog, and finally catching him, and they hug. He remembers though - they’ve both got new lives now. He has the handyman, and the dog has the new robot. He wakes from the reverie, and instead plays September by Earth, Wind, and Fire from his new body as loud as they can. The initial sequence of the two of them together had the same music, where they danced on roller blades in Central Park, and here they dance again, separated by a line down the middle of the screen.
It’s a really gorgeous moment. They stay separate, but they revel in the memory of each other, cherishing the moments they had. Once the song ends, it morphs into two new songs, that they each share with their respective new friends.
There’s no dialogue in the movie, just wonderful background noise, the occasional very-well-done piano, or drums, or guitar to enhance the scene, or the song snippets which give it such poignancy. In a wonderful touch, the robot hums September throughout the movie in its own peculiarly electronic, buzzing way.
The movie, at its core, asks how we deal with the loss of both a potential life, and a real person. It answers: we continue to live, and we cherish the memories.