Review by mollycat

Dolls are artificial beings, machines created by humans in order to serve as prostitutes. They live in a dark underground world, where they roam the streets looking for human clients. Those clients, however, have disappeared, and the dolls lead a purposeless existence, following meaningless routines that are focused on masters which have been absent for a long time.

Malice is one of them. She gets up every day, walks around looking for non-existent clients, and goes for maintenance. The world around her is slowly decaying, as are the dolls themselves.

Things change for her when she gets attacked by a strange monster, which turns her into flesh and blood. Thrilled by her new body, Malice tries to pass on this gift to the other droids that inhabit her world, only to encounter fear and despair instead of the hope she wanted to spread, raising questions about awareness and existence.

I didn't know anything about this movie when I rented it, and felt very confused for the first half hour. However, the feeling of 'what the hell...' soon changed to 'wow, this is great' as i started to make more and more sense of the story. The cg animation is unusual, and reminds of puppetry more than anything else. The world which the dolls inhabit is a mechanical nightmare, and the changed Malice is the only organic thing amongst all the cables and metal. I found it quite moving, especially the relationship between Malice and Joe Admin. It is brave, weird movie, and takes some thinking to make sense of. Highly recommended!