Is this a kids’ film? It’s hard to say. I don’t… I don’t think it is. It’s a family film, rather than a kids’ film, I think is the distinction, similar to the one you’d draw maybe for Doctor Who.
There’s a lot here that I can’t imagine making much sense to a child. I would love to know what the six year old would make of the transitions - deliberately ambiguous, and delightfully unclear the first time - into and out of dream sequences or fantasies. One such sequence involves the titular robot breaking out of the confines of the film projection to spin the screen around to reveal a Wizard Of Oz-esque fantasy. Remarkable, but what must they take from that?
A lot of the time, though, the film balances what is necessary to understand and what is helpful to understand quite well. Despite being a Spanish made film. it is both totally silent and set in an oddly specific 1985 New York, full of things that would not detract to not appreciate them but add if you did.
What helps is that a lot of the film is about the kind of emotions that are best drawn silently, the kind of base level emotions that are simply intuitive. The happiness of finding a friend, the devastation of losing one, the determination to fix things.
And then there’s the ending. Or, rather, endings? I’ve seen comparisons to Past Lives, which feels apt, but there’s also something of La La Land to it too. Honestly a little bit heartbreaking.