There are lots of reasons to be excited about the silver screen right now in Ithaca: Cornell Cinema is firing on all cylinders; cutsie romantic comedies and more sophisticated offerings are available at Cinemapolis; dark thinkers, bloody battles and uplifting idiotics are rotating with astonishing speed through Regal Cinemas. Certain constraints however limit us from jetting off to every movie that perks our interest, and most of the time those choices can be made based on the actors — how many Brad Pitts and Johnny Depps, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portmans does it have? How many does it have to be?

Shane Acker’s 9 is the second digitally animated film produced by Focus Features after Coraline. Congruent to Coraline, 9 is not your average Buzz Lightyear or Bambi, it is a darker take on kiddie sweets.

The protagonist, named 9, wakes up and falls to the experiment room floor. He does a once over and figures that he’s a half-wicker basket, half-zipped up pocket molded to look like a doll. 9 also figures for some reason, that everything around him is very, very weird, perhaps so weird that it is wrong. He ventures out into the world, all dusty and littered with broken washing machines and gun turrets only to meet another half-wicker basket like himself: 2. What great luck! 9 has many questions to ask 2, but before half of them come out of his newly functional mouth, 2 is whisked away by a gargantuan mechanical cat. Persistent by nature, 9 seeks the truth behind the carnage that forms his world. It is made clear that this world is a potential future for earth — one that let machines gain sentience and revolt against their former masters. The ensuing battle destroyed everything alive and mechanical.

For me, the most interesting thing about 9 is its back story, which becomes apparent halfway through the movie, after meeting all the characters, including the rest of the woven-basket dolls. The idea that machines take over the world is somewhat trite, and so is the idea of a man weaving life into something inhuman — but dolls coming to life is just plain creepy and pushes all my buttons. Just like with The Indian in the Cupboard, witnessing our playthings realize that they are conscious and autonomous holds a lot of magic. Put another way, watching something that should be inanimate squeak and squeal to life makes me question my consciousness.

9 is exciting because of its action and its awesome graphics. Placed behind (or in front) of 1, 2, 3 … and 9, a pail is an elevator, a chipped pair of scissors is a good defensive weapon and a shard of glass is … a dangerous shard of glass. The writers were clearly putting their heads on the table, literally, face down with one eye open. In 9, for the undersized chararcters, everything that we pick up with our hands has multiple uses, be it for fighting with or hiding in. Structures like stained glass windows become all the more impressive. 9 should be lauded for its visuals, but what it lacks is just as obvious. The writers of 9 seem to replace key components of film with their take on “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.” That is to say, 9’s plot never really reaches its potential; the characters are as undeveloped and as one-dimensional as possible, the plot twists seem almost ordinary and the ending is as generic as I have ever seen. 9 is fun to watch, but I came out of it feeling hungry. Focus Features is a name to look out for, and I thought Coraline was exceptionally cool, but 9 doesn’t live up to its potential.