I’m not a big fan of Tim Burton,
but as a robot enthusiast, I am happy that I got a chance to catch the movie 9. I was babysitting my cat, who was recovering
from a surgery. She went to sleep on her
bed and I wanted to stay nearby, so I turned on the TV with the remote to find
something to keep me awake. There was
nothing good on and a little after 11:30pm I turned to the SyFy channel (it
should have stayed Sci-Fi, but whatever).
The movie was on and I looked at the TV grid, and it started at
11:30. I thought to myself, why not, I
only missed the first few minutes. I’ll
go ahead and see if I like it.
And
like it I did. I noticed that the main
character 9 was blinking his eyes and they didn’t look like organic eyes. They were blinking like pair of robot eyes,
if a robot could blink. I thought to
myself, Oh, this is neat! So these guys
are actually little robots with bean-bag bodies and goggles for eyes. I could have guessed 9 was a puppet of a
sort, but do puppets move on their own?
The story is a dark tale about a
group of robot puppets that eventually band together to put a stop to an evil
machine. Yes, I said evil machine. Machines can be evil if they are programmed
to learn and do things such as fight in wars or cause destruction. It is actually the programmer who is evil or
greedy, not the machine or computer that is programmed. Of course, there is always that “glitch” in
the programming that would be possible.
So it turned out that these
little robot puppets had a human soul put inside them that gave them life. I
don’t want to give away how that happens, but why else would they have
human-like emotions like compassion, anger, fear, and joy? Especially
compassion. My heart cries happy tears
when I see a robot comfort another robot for their sadness or loss.
Astroboy, Android Kikaider, 9—any Japanese anime, otherwise
animated and live action movies that contain robot characters with souls and
emotions—they are just so fascinating. A
robot with a soul is such an interesting idea to play with in fiction.
