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I’m not supposed to use scissors since…ya know…the incident with my eye…but I’m sure it’ll be okay…

PG-13

Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover

#5: Actually, I don’t mind having one eye.  It’s easier for me.  It allows me to concentrate on just one thing at a time, ya know?

A rag doll labeled number 9 awakes in a room, unaware of who he is or why he is where he is.  Upon venturing into the outside world, 9 meets others like him while trying to escape from a robotic beast.  They venture to a large warehouse and accidentally restart a dormant machine which starts creating more robots whose only purpose is to destroy whatever life they find.

This was apparently originally a short film which has now been written into a full movie.  It’s pretty apparent too, because there’s not much of a story here beyond the mystery of why these little dolls seem to be alive.  Admittedly, I liked that aspect of it, but the characters, and the actions they go through, weren’t quite compelling enough to really make the movie top notch.

The big robot thing that they accidentally activate was pretty cool, but I thought they were too over-matched by it to realistically defeat it in the end.  It seems like they had to intentionally have that robot not use some of its weaponry in order to even give the dolls a chance to win the battle.  Speaking of losing a battle, I thought the back story about the robot/human war was interesting.

The animation is kind of cool, but it’s also too drab at times.  The dolls aren’t as interesting to look at as the few robots we get to see.  Everything is sort of brown and nondescript.  It’s definitely not going to compete with Coraline for most visually interesting animated movie of the year, that’s for sure.

Overall, it’s a somewhat intriguing movie, with some good scenes and decent enough animation.  I just think it’s too thin a plot to stretch out over an hour and a half.

The same lesson we should have learned from many a movie before:  careful with the robots, people…careful with the robots…

10 – 1 for the overall look being a little too drab and depressing – 2 for too thin of a story – .5 for a strange ending that I didn’t much care for = 6.5