Move over, Wall-E; there's a new adorable robot scurrying around the universe. He's a lot less traditional-looking than you are — made of cloth and gears, more steampunk than "Star Trek" — and his movie could stand to be a bit more like the first half of yours, but he's a good match where it counts: the eyes.
Pretty much everyone in Extract is stupid, unlikable, self-destructive or all of the above — and so there are no real surprises. They include:
 Courtesy photo: Focus Features
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Known only as 9 (that is, he was his maker's ninth creation, and the last finished before an apocalypse wiped out humanity), he first arrived in writer/director Shane Acker's short film of the same name. That wonderful movie, which was nominated for an Academy Award, was even more dialogue-free than the first half of "Wall-E," and elegantly wrapped a simple plot of loss and survival into a single action set piece.
Remaking this short as a feature-length film, Acker and screenwriter Pamela Pettler have done away with the silent-film strategy. It's no surprise the movie chooses dialogue (and celebrity voices of Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly) over all-visual storytelling. But the amount and unoriginality of that dialogue drain much of the charm from the source material, making "9" feel more ordinary than its rich visuals and endearing conceits deserve.
The movie's look and feel, though, are a step up even from the original short. Acker's camera moves through this computer-animated world nimbly, and his scenes offer an unusually convincing illusion of depth. The character design is charming, all burlap bodies and expressive, camera-aperture eyes, and the fact that the robots are pint-sized offers chances to get cute with scale: An X-acto blade becomes a fearsome Bowie knife; a tiny spring and fishing hook can be tied together to make a grappling gun.
The action, as 9 and his siblings try to rescue their companions from what looks like a post-industrial Mordor, can be pretty exciting — scary, even, for young children who find the notion of a teeth-gnashing cat skeleton/robot hybrid (complete with a red Terminator eye) a bit intense.
But action and design are pretty much all there is here, with insufficiently developed characters and a skimpy plot that exists just to string one chase scene to the next. Even as one of the shortest movies in theaters this year, "9" feels stretched thin.
