Automaton and on: "Robot Dreams"

Easy to understand why The Boy and the Heron swept this year's major animation prizes: venerated artist, emotive backstory, penhand flourishes vivid enough to overwrite an increasingly tangled and fraying narrative line. Given that it must in each case have been a close-run race, with no one outstanding title for voters to get behind, it's a shame there wasn't more love along the way for the Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger's hand-animated take on Sara Varon's graphic novel Robot Dreams, charting the waxing and waning friendship of a dog and a robot in a New York populated exclusively by animals of one description or another. What awaits you here are far simpler pleasures than the Miyazaki film permitted. Berger recreates Manhattan as it once was, or a Manhattan of the mind, where the Twin Towers never fell and Woody Allen wasn't around to woo his teenage date on a bench beneath the Brooklyn Bridge; an early bonding sequence plays out to Earth Wind and Fire's deathless "September", practically the one song guaranteed to turn even the most stubborn frown upside down. (They could - and should - prescribe the brass section free on the NHS.) Relative simplicity - clear, unfussy lines, familiar brandnames, Bob's Burgers colour - allows the film to find its own semi-distinct identity: that of a Zootropolis with much of the clutter and all of the chatter cleared out, leaving more room for socially awkward Dog and his lovelorn Robot to register and grow on you.

They do, even amid a necessarily static centre stretch in which, with its main characters separated by circumstance, this relationship literally cannot go anywhere. (And actually begins to dwindle.) It's the movie that shifts, unpredictably and charmingly, with the help of fourth-wall breaks, sunflower Busby Berkeley numbers, snowmen who come to life (but not in the Aled Jones way), and a chorus of birds tweeting "Danny Boy". The pacing gets a bit deliberate hereabouts; Berger is having to work overtime padding out to feature status a wispy narrative that might have felt happier still as a short or mid-length proposition. (I fear very young children, otherwise well-placed to embrace these characters, are going to get restless.) Yet there are plenty of deft, funny touches - I liked the way the snowman takes on the colours of the slushie he gulps down at a bowling alley - and by the conclusion you realise what a range of emotions Berger has expressed without recourse to gabbling celebrity voices, or indeed any of those voice cameos from YouTube luminaries you're supposed to know and love. It's the work of an animator (or animators) going their own way and amusing themselves: in forsaking the usual prods and demands of frenetic digimated content, Robot Dreams allows itself time to slap a big, dumb smile on your face, and then sets you to wondering just what else its makers might be getting at here.

Robot Dreams opens in selected cinemas from today.