On Seeing Tim Burton's “9”

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.