There is a well-founded fear that the intensive use of artificial intelligence will deepen the standardization of the cultural product, that the so-called thinking machine will guess what the public wants and give it to them without measure or ingenuity. But it happens that human creators repeat themselves with worn-out formulas all the time. Movie theaters are taken over by sequels and installments of sagas already squeezed before. And with technological resources available to anyone, we no longer distinguish what is animation and what is live action, which characters respond to the talent of the actors and which to that of designers and engineers.
Some examples: movies Avatar (the third is on the way) are they animation? What we see in most of the footage are strange, tall, blue humanoid beings in idyllic but clearly artificial jungle and sea landscapes. From there comes a product that is dazzling in its aesthetics, but not at all realistic. It’s not animation, director James Cameron maintains; He even claims that this does not interest him. He vindicates the actors who played their roles in a studio even though nothing of their real physical appearance, only some of their gestures and movements, resembles what we see on the screen.
What is Mufasa: The Lion King, the prequel to the Disney classic that will be released this summer? It’s what they call in English live-action remakes, a kind of hyper-realistic virtual reality that the Mickey mouse brand now abuses without managing to repeat the magic it had. And is that of a saga, otherwise dispensable, like Godzilla and Kong? It’s doubtful: the protagonists are two gigantic monsters recreated digitally, like much of the rest.
The most advanced visual effects cease to amaze when they become routine. That is why it is a credit to still make handmade jewelry. One finds oneself with Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger’s animated film that competed until the end for an Oscar in March and is now offered by Movistar+. The care with which it was made in the 2D animation, that of a lifetime, is appreciated. We have some endearing and simplified characters, like a comic (based on a comic by Sara Varon), and some settings, those of the decadent New York of the early eighties, exquisitely drawn, as Hergé, the author of Tintin, did, in which called the clear line.
What makes it different Robot Dreams It is not only its visual beauty: it is a script that stands out for its tenderness and poetry, which speaks of friendship and separation, of loneliness in the big city, of the fragile nature of human relationships, although here all the residents of the Big Apple are anthropomorphic animals except for some robots like the protagonist. And to achieve that, the film does not need words (we hear no words other than the lyrics of the songs on its excellent soundtrack) or digital fanfare. The story penetrates the viewer, transmits emotions that machines do not yet understand. When it is no longer possible to distinguish animation from live action, because almost nothing will be real in the cinema, we will remember Robot Dreams.
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