"Giraffes are sneaky, and they will rob you blind."

I saw the movie 9 tonight.

I'm really tempted to just stop there.

For anybody who doesn't know, 9 follows a gang of mechanical rag-doll creations across a postapocalyptic landscape, where they fight off giant spidery machines and learn about friendship. Or something.

I really couldn't tell you for sure, because after sitting through the movie for the slowest 90 minutes of my life, I realized I had no idea what the point of the movie was.

Don't misunderstand me--I'm hardly one of those people who thinks that every single movie has to have some deep theme buried in its subtext. For example, the point of Anchorman is to make people laugh, and nothing else. And if you're me, it makes you laugh so hard you fall off the couch. It doesn't matter that Anchorman isn't about to be lauded for its revloutionary approach to the issue of apartheid or global climate change or how humans in general are lazy, stupid, greedy morons or whatever (Apologies for the mini-rant, but is it just me, or does it seem like easily half the movies out today are trying to tell us how we're ruining everything because we're stupid and insatiable?).

But my problem with this movie is that literally nothing happened. That's not entirely true. It could probably be better said that nothing I cared anything about happened. Here's what did happen. Some decidely weird and distinctly cute rag-dolls with spark plug-looking eyes ran around, ducked from some spidery, big, loud, kinda scary machines. Then the mechanical rag-dolls ran some more, talked a little bit (mostly things like, "Oh, no!" and "Run!"--I am pretty sure the entire cast recorded the whole movie in one day. No one seems to have more than 50 lines.), ran from some very big explosions, fell off of some stuff, talked some more, listened to Judy Garland (true story) and ran a bit more, just for the heck of it.

Snore. I will say that the animation is beautiful, but it's a beautiful snore. And Tim Burton is an executive producer, which is interesting, because I thought halfway through (when I was asking myself if it was over yet), "This movie is like what Tim Burton would do if he wanted to have no fun at all and be totally hopeless."

This is also not a movie for children. Not having a TV, I don't know if it's being marketed to them or not, but it is animated, so...

It is so bleak, and has so many frightening scenes (and not fun, pulling-a-head-out-of-a-box-Nightmare-Before-Christmas-frightening) that if I had seen it as a kid, I would have run screaming from the theater. As most kids are not as wimpy as I was, there's a good chance they'll just fall asleep.

It's a shame, because it does look lovely, if you can find good enough reason to keep your eyes open.