The title, 9, refers to the hero’s name. He's one of a group of eight-inch-tall zippered-, buttoned- and stitched-together cloth or burlap “stitchpunk” cuddlies with iris diaphragm-goggle eyes. The Pamela Pettler script is an elongated treatment of first-time feature director Shane Acker’s eleven-minute Oscar-nominated short, his Masters Degree thesis film.

Perhaps too dark for the kiddies in palette and in baddies, 9 also appears scary in the onslaught of outstanding sound effects, while the visuals give a non-CGI texture engineered through direction, camerawork, design and animation at Starz Animation Toronto. The voices are done by the famous but not so selling-point identifiable as to overpower the on-screen creations.

This “great adventure movie” stands apart, not much in story but in what it brings to the eye of the beholder. And there are many echoes of other entertaining movies in this respect, from silent Metropolis through the lived-in equipment and crab-like machine troops of the Star Wars trilogy and RoboCop’s ED 209, the rubbled future of The Terminator and many a post-apocalyptic picture, the feel and mythic quest of The Dark Crystal, the embattled insects of Antz, even the symbology of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon franchise.

Which is not to say that 9 doesn’t stand on its own short legs, but simply that the search for “the Source” needed to beat the unbeatable foe is nothing new. That implacable enemy of beings with hearts and emotions, the inarticulate Beast and its minions, is a Great Machine, perhaps envious of its prey. In any case, this is the old cautionary tale out of H.G. Wells and others, of man’s genius leading to his downfall, not from a mad scientist’s desire for domination but from a good one’s (Alan Oppenheimer) being duped by a Hitlerian Chancellor (Tom Kane).

The Raggedy Ann and Andy heroes are led by 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), at first voiceless on awakening in a destroyed city prowled by  mechanical monstrosities and punctuated by bodies like those of a mother and child in a rusting automobile. He picks up a hemispheric triptych “talisman,” is given power of speech by an elderly candle-topped 2 (by Martin Landau), and led back to the surviving creatures’ leader.

His pronouncements enforced by Michelin Mannish 8 (Fred Tatasciore), mitered head 1 (Christopher Plummer) advocates a credo of no-profile living in the blatantly symbolic soaring cathedral, as debris burns and settles all around and, on the red horizon, three balancingly blatant smokestacks belch black from the machines’ factory lair. In the belfry with a stopped clock are also 6 (Crispin Glover), who draws odd symbols, and the blue-cowled nonverbal twins 3 and 4, who study dusty library texts.

Accompanied by loyal but timorous 5 (John C. Reilly), 7 defies 1, goes searching into a sandbagged bunker, and encounters courageous 7 (Jennifer Connelly), a lone fighter in beaked headgear.

Into the belly of the beast the heroes must descend, to release souls and free whoever can be freed, and to overcome fear and the disastrous results of human folly. These little folk are cherubically sexless, though there is more than an unfortunate hint of feminine admiration in previously independent 7’s feelings about 9.

Along the way to the outcome, these beings also learn who they are, where they come from, and why. Soul is what distinguished man from brute, and 9 and his appealing cohorts have that in abundance.

(Released by Focus Features and rated “PG-13” for violence and scary images.)