Robot Dreams is an animated film from the Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger and while it doesn’t have the production values of something by Pixar or Disney or DreamWorks, it will capture your heart. Sweet, charming, deeply moving…. Readers, I welled up! At a cartoon! This is something we need never speak of again.

It is based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon and stars absolutely no one, as there are no voices to voice. There is sound but no dialogue, like Mr Bean, although the similarity ends there. It is set in the 1980s in a New York populated by anthropomorphic animals. Hail a taxi and your driver may be a Sikh elephant, or your FedEx delivery guy may be a bull, and look at this warthog washing his car while swinging his big old bottom to mambo music from the radio. It’s delightful. I want to move there.

Readers, I welled up! At a cartoon! This is something we need never speak of again

But our main character, a dog called ‘Dog’, is sad. He is lonely. Of an evening, in his apartment, Dog plays Pong against himself and microwaves a miserable TV dinner, possibly not in the manner of all lonely dogs everywhere as, in my experience, they are most likely to shred your slippers and/or raid the kitchen bin. This dog, in his quest for companionship, orders a build-your-own-robot, as seen late one night on a television infomercial. Once constructed, ‘Robot’ is affectionate, curious, kind, thrilled by everything – and devoted to Dog. They become the best of friends.

They enjoy a joyous summer together. They roller-skate in Central Park to Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ (I still have the earworm). They take in the view from the top of the Empire State Building, eat hotdogs, slurp Tab, watch a VHS of the Wizard of Oz. They hold hands, but not homoerotically (there is no telling if either is male, but I think they are).

Love has been poured into the cityscapes. Every frame offers a detail that didn’t have to be there but is, whether it’s the cloud of red dust that rises every time anyone opens a bag of Cheetos or the adverts on the subway. (I bet you’d forgotten you could double the pleasure with Doublemint gum? I was never convinced it held its flavour more than Juicy Fruit but perhaps that’s a conversation for another day.) Then they take a trip to Coney Island where disaster strikes and the pair are separated. Will they ever be reunited? I daren’t say more. But it will totally break your heart and, embarrassingly, you will cry.

The animation is basic, two-dimensional, where mouths are simple lines and eyes can just be black dots but, somehow, Robot and Dog are miraculously expressive. Wordlessly so. The animals are perhaps surrogates for our own fears of losing those to whom we are close – look at me, reading meaning into a film where a duck pushes a pram and a giraffe nods off on the subway.

Unusually, there is no villain. Life just gets in the way sometimes. It has a running time of one hour and 42 minutes and could be shorter, but when Robot has one of his dreams – in which, for example, a multitude of daisies start tap-dancing, Busby Berkeley-style – you can forgive its meanderings. It is pitched more at adults with its nostalgia (a Walkman!) and melancholic undertow but children will, I think, also enjoy it.

It was up for an Oscar but was beaten by Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron, which is thoroughly incoherent yet is voiced by Florence Pugh, Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe and Christian Bale, among others. That had the stars – and this? It has the storytelling.