Here's a close look at all nine characters from **9, courtesy of Focus Features. The animated dystopian sci-fi is directed by Shane Acker, and produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, and released in September.
It's the story of nine ragdolls given the spark of life and sent on an impossible quest; kind of like Little Big Planet, only not. 1 is the caped leader, voiced by Christopher Plummer; 2 is the rickety Martin Landau-voiced inventor; 3 and 4 are nerdy researcher twins who share a poster (casting yet to be revealed); 5 is John C. Reilly's one-eyed engineer; 6 is the stripey visionary, described in the PR as "reclusive and eccentric", so naturally voiced by Crispin Glover; the token girl is Jennifer Connelly's ninja 7; 8 is another fighter, this time wielding a cleaver (ubiquitous voice artist Fred Tatasciore); and our heroic zip-fronted newborn is 9 himself, voiced by Elijah Wood.
Beautiful artwork, but it needs to be, as an outsider in a summer dominated (at least as far as animation goes) by Pixar's **Up! **The Pixar/Dreamworks/Fox party is a tough one to crash, but 9 is looking awesome and at least has a lot more hope than Delgo.
Incidentally, news of 9 seems to be coming from the future, since the Scientist who invented the dolls has a popular Facebook blog where the film's back-story is currently unravelling. If he kept an eye on the movie news he could avoid his fate altogether. The future is not set, after all.