On September 9th, 2009 (09/09/09, get it?), the animated post-apocalyptic ragdoll action movie 9 opened in theaters. If this wasn’t something on your radar back in the day, I promise you it was a real film.

Our titular hero “9” (voiced by Elijah Wood) is a ragdoll who awakens in a nightmarish world overcome by killer robots. He befriends several of his kind along the way, each named by a number. Unlike 9 himself, each character he encounters seems capable of experiencing only one personality trait, whether it’s courage (7), curiosity (3 and 4), kindness (2), or paranoia (1). The reason for this is they are all creations of a human scientist, who split his soul into nine pieces in order to make them.

Eventually 9 is able to motivate his new friends to fight the robot menace, and a lot of ragdolls die violently. 9 is notable for being a rare PG-13 animated movie (although I’m not sure if it earns the rating or not), and features plenty of nightmarish imagery. It’s also very brown visually, making it a fairly bleak film to look at it, but the steampunk environment where all of the action takes place is still cool all the same.

In addition to Wood, the movie has some other impressive voices, with the best work coming from Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly. 9 was a fairly decent hit considering what it was (a very dark and weird idea for an adventure film), but it seems to have fallen into pop culture obscurity since then. 2009 was a great year for animated movies, with several instant classics including Coraline, Up and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Is 9 as good as any of those? No. But it is worth checking out if you haven’t already, if not simply to watch something you truly haven’t seen anything like before.

Also, the trailer for 9 was dope as all fuck…