Julián Larrauri and Nacho Subirats on assembling Robot Dreams

In Robot Dreams, based on Sara Varon’s comic of the same name, a lonely dog named Dog decides to build himself a friend. With the pigeons on the sill of his 1980s New York City apartment as his witnesses, he brings Robot to life. The pair become inseparable as they explore the city — until a fateful day at the beach. In keeping with the comic, Robot Dreams has no dialogue, relying on animated character acting to express the thoughts and feelings in this deeply touching story.

Robot Dreams was created by Arcadia’s pop-up animation studio under the direction of Spanish-French director Pablo Berger. This was Berger’s first foray into animated filmmaking, though you wouldn’t know it from the accolades. The film has been widely acclaimed, winning 22 awards and 44 award nominations – including a nomination for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. 

We had the chance to sit down with Julián Larrauri (line producer) and Nacho Subirats (assistant director) to discuss the unique production process required to create Robot Dreams. 

I remember reading the graphic novel when it was first published. It’s such a simple yet poignant story. It’s not surprising to me that your adaptation got an Oscar nod.

Nacho: We were [surprised]!

Julián:  It's funny. Arcadia called me to say, “We are producing an animated movie. We want you on the team as the producer of the movie, to do line producing.” They told me about Robot Dreams. So I went really quickly to Amazon and I bought the comic.

But before the comic came, they sent me the script. So the first thing I read was the script. Amazon is really fast, but not as fast as me reading that script because it was wonderful. Before the comic came to my hands, I was already sure that I wanted to be part of this movie. Because what Pablo did in that script was incredible. 

For me, it was fantastic. The exercise that Pablo did, that he respected the comic so much but, at the same time, he enriched it with his own script. He put his own point of view into each of the drawings of the comic. At the end the movie that we made is Pablo's vision. What he did in that script, it's in the final movie.

It was clear that your team at Arcadia was able to really expand on the simplicity of the comic while keeping its spirit. And I think I saw more humour in the film than in the comic.

Julián: Pablo wanted that bittersweet feeling. 

Nacho: There's humour, but there's also some strong feelings, human feelings. Because as Julián said, the novel is really clear and it shows what it shows. But then Pablo is able to look at it and think deeply. He could see things that we couldn't see.

And maybe it's because he was living there in New York for almost 10 years. But he was able to see the city perfectly and then set up those two characters  there and then add richness to the story. 

This wasn't made because a studio decided to capitalize on a popular book. It was an artist saying, “This is an amazing story. I want to make a movie out of this.”

Julián: Yeah, definitely. 

Nacho: Yeah, that's the good thing about Pablo as well. He only has four movies and he has a long, long career, but he makes only the movies he wants to make. And that I think that shows on this particular film. 

Julián: Yeah, that's something that you see in his filmography. And I can say that he's obsessed with the details. From my position, he drove me crazy during the production with this obsession with detail. But I have to recognize that in the end, the details really add value to his movies. 

He was so, so obsessed, like, “No, we need to do this like this in New York in the 80s. This was like this. We need to be precise. We need to change this little animation here because it's really important to the authenticity of the story. 

So in my position, sometimes it was like, “No, Pablo, please don't do this.” But I have to recognize that the final result of the movie was so good. And I think that authenticity makes you believe in what happens to the characters. 

It would be easy to assume that Robot Dreams had to have been made by a New York-based studio. But Arcadia’s team was based in Madrid and Pamplona! So what were some of the challenges in capturing not just New York City, but specifically New York City forty years ago?

Julián: Yeah, it's funny because ninety percent of the animators are people in their twenties who have never been to New York in their entire life. So for us, it was a real challenge.. Pablo told us that a person who lived in New York in the 80s had to feel this was something real. We couldn’t make any mistakes.

So he took the references to a level that was really, really high. He came with the help of Yuko Arami. She did absolutely fantastic work, gathering references from all the places, houses, the way the chairs were, the way the concrete was in New York in the 80s. We have folders and folders and folders of documentation. It was like every animator was an expert of that New York. 

We had so much material documenting not only how things looked in that time, but also how the people behaved. “This is the way they made the hot dogs in Central Park.” All those details are in the movie thanks to that obsession with documentation. 

Nacho: We didn't have the chance to go there as many studios do to take references. But it didn't matter because if you wanted to see how people wore their clothes in Soho, for example, you could find photos to help the character designers. Or even the envelopes! Every crazy detail you can imagine is documented. It was awesome.

Julián: And the good thing of doing it with Harmony, was that we made the complete pipeline in Toon Boom. Not only the animation, but also the comp. So we had the flexibility to change some little things at the end of the process. That was really helpful. Putting this trademark here, changing this prop, was something that we were able to do. 

I read an interview where Pablo said that, because he’s mainly a live-action filmmaker, he’s not used to static backgrounds. So there are even little stories with small details playing out in the backgrounds of shots.

Nacho: I was very lucky to direct some of those extras along with Pedro Alpera, who was the crew supervisor. By the end of the production, Pablo relied on me a lot. He told me, “Okay, Nacho, this is the main action. I will be really focused on that so you can think about all these extra characters and all these cars.” 

I won't spoil it for you, but at the end, there's a scene where there are a lot of people as they are living in New York. There are a lot of cars. But the important thing is the main action between the characters. 

Julián: We had to create that balance of having a lot of noise in the background but, at the end, having the audience focus on the emotions.

Before Robot Dreams, Arcadia had only ever made live-action films. So this animation studio basically had to be built from the ground up for this project. What was it like working on a project for a pop-up studio? And how did it change the production process?

Julián: It's really hard to create a studio from zero. And once you know everything about your studio, about your project, you have to say, ”Okay, we are finished. Goodbye.” And it's a pity. So that's the bad thing.

The good thing is that the people that we hired in this movie were the people this movie needed. That's something really important because it's not like, “OK, I have a studio. So this studio needs to do some character design. We have this character design in our crew, so he's going to be the one who is going to make this.”

Maybe his character designs are too realistic or maybe it's too whatever. And it's not the perfect character design for this project. In this specific case, it was the opposite. It's like, “Okay, we want to make this movie in this specific style. So let's find the people who have this specific style.”

For example, we had a lot of people from the comic world, because this movie was like a comic in movement. That's one of the feelings that Jose Luis Ágreda, our director, wanted to have in this movie. We needed the best car designers in Spain. So we called him and we said, “You want to collaborate on our movie?” And he collaborates with us.

Or Paco Cabrera, for example. He's one of the most famous ink artists in Spain. We counted on him to do all the ink on the movie, a lot of inks in the movie. The great thing was we hired the perfect people from each of the roles of the movie. In the end everybody was working on what they do best.

So it was really hard, especially for production, to find those people knowing that you were going to work with them for just two, three years. But the good thing is that the final result of the movie, I think, is so unique because we have had the perfect person for the perfect task.

Nacho: Yeah, we were like a family at the end of the movie. We’d been building from scratch through all of the process, all together and rowing in the same direction. Some people had to move here to Madrid or to Pamplona to work on the project. But it was worth it because we learned a lot during the whole process. And as Julián said, we had the right people for the right tasks.

It's not everyday that you get to handpick exactly who you want and assemble a team like that. Was that a challenging process? 

Julián: A little bit, yeah. We were a completely new Spanish production company doing a really small project. When we made our movie, the 2D animation world was exploding. There were some really big American 2D animation movies working at the same moment as us. 

I had maybe 300-400 people, having interviews with them, and it was really hard to convince people to come to our movie. A lot of animators said, “I prefer to work on the really big American movie.” But in some way, I think it was also like a filter. Because the people that decided to come with us fell in love with the project. I think all the people that were involved in this movie were some kind of romantic with animation.

Nacho: Yes, and we came from lockdown. So as Julián said, the animation industry was exploding with many projects at the same time. And many of my friends were working on those projects. And now they regret not working on Robot Dreams. They didn't have a reference of Pablo because he’d never done animation before. So they didn't know how this was going to end. But we believed.

Julián: You never know. Reading the script, I thought this was going to be something special. But I never imagined like all the things that happened to the movie, like being in Cannes. It was like a dream come true.

I think my feeling was that this was going to be that kind of animated movie that inside industry people will say, “Hey, you have to see this one little small Spanish film called Robot Dreams. It's a jewel. You have to watch it because it's fantastic.” 

I was thinking it's going to be that cult movie that inside industry people are going to talk about. But seeing that the critics and the audience really love it, for everybody I think it was a dream, but it was a surprise. 

It does take a leap of faith to go for the smaller, artistic project over something more formulaic with the bigger paycheck. It is always amazing when those projects pay off and are recognized the way that they deserve to be. 

The original comic had a distinct style, but it was quite minimalist, which doesn’t always translate well to the big screen. How did Pablo and the team choose which details to add to the world?

Nacho: That was really the first thing for Jose Luis Ágreda, the art director, to be focused on: how to move from the comic to a movie, and respect the essence of the comic. 

So the line was really important. We didn't want to use the focus on the lenses that we are used to in animation – putting some blur to make that distance more evident. We play with the width of the line, because the closer to the camera, the bigger it gets.

It was really important to establish what was the main point, to not lose the focus point. It was also a tricky thing to do. But I think Jose Luis and the team managed to do that really, really well. And we established some rules to make some different depth for the line, and I think it worked.

Julián: Yeah, I think Jose Luis's obsession was to respect the original comic book, to respect that essence of the comic. But at the same time, because we are making a movie for the bigger screen, we needed to make it more sophisticated.

So I think he found that balance of enriching the image with more detail, but at the same time keeping it as a comic, with the strategies that Nacho has explained, like working with the thickness of the line. Also working with the color. The more you go to the back, the colour is going to be more blue, less saturated, less vibrant, so that way you have that feeling of depth. They used a lot of techniques that really come from the comic world. 

That style is L'Enclair, from Belgium and France. That's really typical there, with that big line, with plain colours, but backgrounds with a lot of detail. So they play that card of the European comic, and I think that was the thing that works very well. 

You see one frame of the movie and you feel like you are really in a comic, but at the same time, it has the sophistication of a movie. So finding that balance, that was really hard. I think that Jose Luis and his team were able to find the perfect place where it's cinematographic, but at the same time it's comic, and respects the original work of Sara Varon. 

Nacho: He also came from the comic book industry. He knows all the tricks.

Julián: Yeah, and all the people. It was funny, for example, we didn't find the way to make trees in the movie. So he told me, “I know one guy, I love the way he designs the trees. Call him.” It was a special collaboration, three weeks just drawing trees.

Nacho: Also with the vehicles, the cars and all. 

Yeah, in a city like New York,  you'd be very specific about what the traffic looks like, just to place it in the right era.

Julián: Jose Luis explained to me that the characters are really, really cartoony, and the backgrounds are realistic with a lot of detail. So you need to make the cars realistic enough to work in that background, but it has to be also really cartoony to work with that character.

It's that element between the two worlds, and it's really important to keep it in the perfect design. So again, he hired a person who draws cars like an angel, and he  did a complete study, and then the team took it and we evolved the cars to the way that they look now in the movie.

That's really clever to use the cars specifically as the visual bridging point. What was it like to create a film, particularly a feature-length film, with no dialogue? 

Julián: That was really hard, but at the same time, Pablo is an expert in no-dialogue movies. His second movie was Blancanieves, with no dialogue at all. And Pablo knows the power of the image. He knows that the dialogue helps you to tell the narrative, but the pure cinematic power is in the image. 

Another thing that is key in this movie is that you are able to explore the characters. Sometimes just putting in a line helps you, as a shortcut. So he did it the hard way, but the good thing is that the creativity is even more. If you give yourself limits in some places, it helps you to find new ways of explaining things that nobody has done yet.

Nacho: Yeah, totally. Pablo is a huge fan of silent [filmmakers] like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. He likes those kinds of movies that were done at the beginning of cinema history.

And I think it was liberating for the production because we didn't have to record any voices at the beginning. So we could start really early because we didn't have to hire actors. Although at the end of the movie, we hired some to make some little breaths and some minimum sounds to add more depth to the characters.

It's interesting that you bring up Buster Keaton, because his films were the first thing that came to my mind when watching parts of Robot Dreams. He famously hated using captions in his films. He said if you have to write it down, you're not being clever enough. And that's part of why he was so popular internationally – his films didn’t need to be translated. Anybody with eyes can watch them and understand what's happening.

Nacho: It's universal. We have to be really be very focused on the looks of the characters.

Julián: The microgestures.

Nacho: Yeah. The pupils must move to that direction, because if not, they are now looking at each other. We set up some time for Pablo and I to look at the pupils in specific moments for the emotion that we needed to explain.

Robot Dreams is also a 2D animated production. Is 2D the norm in Spain or was it something that you got a chance to go back to? 

Julián: Usually in Spain, and I think all around the world, they identify each of animation styles [with a genre]. “This is a family movie, so it has to be animated in 3D.” So it's like people have that in mind. And I think that in the last few years that things are changing little by little. And people are starting to understand that you can have an animation movie that can be for families, for adults, a romantic comedy, a horror movie, or whatever. So no, animation is not a genre. You can do whatever you want in animation.

I think the people that are helping to do this are the famous directors from live action that enter in animation to do their stuff – like Pablo Berger, like Guillermo del Toro, or like Wes Anderson. Because they experiment with animation and they do their movies the same way they make their live action movies. That’s really important for the industry, because each animation movie can look completely different. You can do 2D, 3D, 2.5D, or with water colours or oil paints. You can do whatever you want. I know that the audience has to familiarize with that, and that people are not doing that because the audience feels weird.

But I think little by little, the audience is starting to understand that you can have a complete universe in each movie. Pixar is the best movie to do Pixar's movies. So leave that with Pixar because they do it fantastically and do something different. Be different from Pixar. 

And the good thing with Robot Dreams is that they had it really clear from the beginning. The moment that Jose Luis entered the movie, everybody agreed that that was the perfect style for this movie and everything went really smoothly because of that.

Nacho: And Toon Boom Harmony was the perfect tool because it's a vectorized line. We could solve some problems during the production, if we needed a zoom out or something. That way of working helped us to solve those little problems easily.

Julián: In the end we used three programs in this movie: Photoshop to do the backgrounds, Toon Boom Harmony to do the animation, and Storyboard Pro to do the story. And I think that's good because we had less technical problems and you can focus on the artistic part. So I think it was a really good choice.

Nacho: We even had two or three people in the animation department that made some tools in Toon Boom to help us export the videos, for example. And they even did some Rascal drawings that you click on and then the render of the movie was done in a click.

Julián: So little scripts inside the program with the icon of Robot or Rascal.

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• Ready to watch the film? Robot Dreams is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
• Interested in learning more about Arcadia? Visit the studio's website.
• Thinking about your next independent project? Artists can download a free 21-day trial of Toon Boom Harmony.