Electric Sheep?

Film: Robot Dreams
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

On my list of Oscar movies from 2023, there are two that have been impossible to find for me. I’m going to have to do a trial of HBO to get The Zone of Interest, I suppose. The one that was more problematic until recently was Robot Dreams, which wasn’t even streaming for pay anywhere. But, suddenly, it’s streaming on Hulu, and I finally got the chance to watch it and complete the Best Animated Feature category from last year.

Robot Dreams is fascinating for a number of reasons. The first is that there is no dialogue in the film. There’s music with lyrics and there are some vocalizations, but no one really speaks through the entirety of the film. This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course, but it is pretty unusual. Another interesting part of this film is that despite having anthropomorphized animals for most of the characters, this takes place in the real world. Our characters don’t just go to baseball games, but are Mets fans. They drink Tropicana and read Stephen King books and eat Nathan’s hot dogs with (gasp) Heinz ketchup. This, incidentally, is more evidence that the film takes place in New York; no self-respecting Chicagoan would ever put ketchup on a hot dog.

White as Snow

Film: Blancanieves
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Friend and once-and-future podcasting partner Nick Jobe and I trade lists of films now and again; I’ve got one of Nick’s coming up in a little more than a week, matter of fact. Because of this, I tend to have my eye out for films that I suspect he hasn’t seen and that I like. Nick’s got a thing for fantasy and fairy tales, which meant going into Blancanieves, a modern silent retelling of the Snow White story was particularly interesting for me. I figured if it was good enough to recommend, I’d give this to Nick on his next list.

I haven’t quite made up my mind on it in terms of that recommendation for Nick. Blancanieves has a great deal going for it in addition to its retelling of a classic fairy tale brought forward to the modern era. There are problems, though, and most unfortunately, the bulk of the problems come in the last 10 minutes. When a good film shits the bed at the end, it ends up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Blancanieves doesn’t quite go that far, but what should be a resolution for the audience ends up being completely unfulfilled all the way around. This means we’re likely going to get to some spoilers here before the end.