A final gift from Satoshi Kon: a road movie where robots carry all the emotional weight humans usually do, and somehow that absence makes everything hurt more. No dialogue can hide behind faces that don't move the way ours do. What arrives is a film that works as pure adventure for kids, then reveals itself as something much stranger for anyone who's watched Kon turn the inside of a mind into a landscape, a dream into a trap, a story into a mirror. The robots are alone the way his characters always were, searching for something they can't quite name. This is what it looks like when a master animator says goodbye without saying a word.
The Dream Machine is the fifth feature planned by director Satoshi Kon, a fantasy adventure with science fiction elements. Its cast contains no humans at all, only robots, and Kon described it as a kind of road movie about machines. He aimed it at younger audiences while intending that longtime fans of his earlier films would enjoy it too. Kon died in August 2010 in the middle of production. Madhouse resumed work that November with character designer Yoshimi Itazu serving as acting director. Producer Masao Maruyama later said the project had stalled over funding, with roughly 600 of its 1500 shots animated, and in 2013 he said he still hoped to complete it.
