9 voodoo dolls and a whole lot of terrifying machine monsters in a city of ruins. Yeah, it is a truly dark, bleak and at times making your heart pump a little faster when those machines get close-up shots or our main characters are chased by them. The highlight of the movie is its unique visual style and the designs on the machine monsters . The desolated environment is surprisingly detailed preventing it from being just a pile of bricks but actual ruins. Despite an at times sporadic narrative and a story of technology taking over the earth we have heard many times before, I liked the twists and turns it took here and there. The dolls' collective backstory was especially interesting and added just what was needed.Not for younger viewers, but one worth checking out with your older kids if you like these kinds of bleak movies.

'9' is a movie that I would regard as one of my favourite animated movies - even in the 20-10 area of my favourite movies overall.The film sees a ragdoll, named 9 and voiced by Elijah Wood in his second best roll second only to Frodo in LOTR, learn and discover a world that he has just entered and is meant to save. This being a movie, of course he achieves this goal; twice in fact. And that is where my one flaw of the movie comes from.If you've watched the movie you will know that the first of the other ragdolls 9 meets, 2, kidnapped by a cat like robot named 'The beast' in the very beginning after providing 9 with a voice box and giving just enough exposition to keep the viewer interested. This leads to 9 finding the other ragdolls and trying to convince them to save 2. One of them, 5, joins him in this venture and they are successful, with help from another ragdoll who abandoned the afters to have the freedom she wanted, 7, in saving two. The beast killed in the process and this is when the world is saved the first. However, there is still about an hour to the films run time at this point so we need a plot device to create a conflict; and this is when 9 clumsily does what the beast was trying to do in reawakening the machine that brought the land to be in a ruined stated. I can easily, and without regret, turn the film off just after the beast is killed and just before 9 does this as I have already gotten a happy ending. Everyone is safe from the beast and the ragdolls can do whatever they want without fear.The rest of movie is good, filled with more action and more visuals, but with a point in the film which makes it easy to turn off, the movie loses two points out of ten. Two points are deducted because of the extra content you loose by turning off the film when 2 is saved; if you turn it off that is (which I have done on one occasion).

This film at it's core explores the idea of humanity and what it means to be human. It does this by exploring themes such as friendship, curiosity and discovery, family and the fundamental question we all ask "why am I here and what is my purpose?" What makes the film so unique is that it projects these onto the main characters which are small ragdoll like automatons who have been set with the task of undoing the wrongdoings of their creator. This film has heart and on a first viewing the core themes and story may be lost by the stunning visuals of the characters and the environment they interact within. So I recommend at least watching this film twice to really appreciate all it has to offer. This film is set In a post apocalyptic setting yet it still manages to feel so unique. The closest I can think as far as cinematography is The Book of Eli, yet this is much more menacing and darker. Although wrapped up like a children's film with the animation, it definitely is for a more mature audience.

I remember my brother and I being so stoked for this movie as kids. When it finally came out on DVD we were disappointed. Years later I watched it again, and found I was even more disappointed. 9 had a fantastic idea. I wanted to love it so much because of this. I mean, sackboys surviving in the apocalypse? That's pretty original. I've never heard of anything like it. Unfortunately, it was unable to carry out it's fantastically original idea. The story was lacking and the plot was quite formulaic, it felt like Shane Acker had a good idea and nothing more. No direction or idea of how to push these characters through 79 minutes without it getting too boring. Which brings me to the characters themselves. The characters are cliché, formulated around the average cast of characters that are used in a lot of movies. The badass female, the big strong man, the greedy king, the geek, the cripple, the neutral lead, etc. There's really not a whole lot in terms of characters, and although I found some points of peril (specifically near the end) to be rather distressing or sad at points, I never felt like I truly knew or cared about the characters. Overall, 9 was a cool movie. With a fantastic idea, an equally fantastic artistic design, and enough character development for you to care at least a little, it's worth checking out. Unfortunately it suffered from unoriginality in plot and relatively flat characters. That's not to say that formulaic movies are bad, but some just make it too obvious, and this was one of them. I give it extra points for its idea and art, but when it comes down to it, 9 is severely lacking. I would've said its nothing special but it truly is special, it just didn't know it. I'd love to see a re- imagining/reboot of this movie in the future, but chances are that won't happen. Check it out though, it's not great, but it's worth a watch.