Dark clouds cover the sky above an endless metropolis. This is Thelomeris, city of cogwheels and clocks. There free will is a distant memory and where personal interests rule over real emotions and values. The citizens live to operate the clock factory and create energy for making even more clockworks. No one knows why the city was established, who built it or how long it has existed.
In 1812, on the eve of the decisive battle of Borodino, a French secret agent steals a battle plan of the Russian troops. This fact is known to General Kutuzov, thanks to a young nobleman named Alexey Tarusov. Tarusov joins a regiment of Russian lancers, and finds new friends and together they have many adventures...
At the beginning of the film, we learn that the story takes place in one of many alternate worlds, in which a person's soul is contained within an animal companion called a dæmon (pronounced demon). The Magisterium, represented as a unified religious power, exercises power in the secular world. Lyra Belacqua, an orphan that resides in Jordan College, in a city that resembles Oxford, with her dæmon Pantalaimon (Pan), accidentally witnesses a Magisterium member poison her uncle's bottle of Tokay. Lyra then warns her uncle, Lord Asriel, who instructs her to remain in hiding. Lyra watches Asriel give a presentation regarding Dust, a particle that the Magisterium has forbidden the mention of. The college gives Asriel a grant to fund a northern expedition.
France, 1941. Napoleon V rules France and for the last 70 years, scientists have been mysteriously disappearing, depriving mankind of their inventions. Avril (Marion Cotillard), a teenage girl, goes in search of her parents, two of the missing scientists.
In a technologically advanced 1939, the zeppelin Hindenburg III arrives in New York City, mooring atop the Empire State Building. Aboard the airship is Dr. Jorge Vargas (Julian Curry), a scientist who arranges for a package containing two vials to be delivered to Dr. Walter Jennings (Trevor Baxter). Moments later, as the courier looks back while leaving with the vials, Dr. Vargas is nowhere to be seen.
In a dilapidated apartment building in post-apocalyptic France, food is in short supply and grain is used as currency. On the ground floor is a butcher's shop, run by the landlord, Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who posts job opportunities in the Hard Times paper as means to lure victims to the building, whom he murders and butchers as a cheap source of meat to sell to his tenants.
The shadow of Nathan Rijckx, a Belgian soldier who died in World War I, is captured by a collector. He is offered the chance to live again if he captures the shadows of 10,000 other people instead. He thinks nothing of his job at first. Simply find the name, pick the death, and capture the shadow when they die. Between his job, he touches the nails in his own shadow to remember what it was like right when he died. He remembers the woman Sarah Winters, who helped him right before his death, and how he was in love with her, and his mission is given new purpose.
During World War II, Russian soldiers on a reconnaissance mission receive a distress call that would lead them further into Germany. The message seems to repeat without any response to their queries, and at the same time that they begin to receive the message, they lose radio contact with their command. Although the others are dubious about the existence of other Russians in the area, Sgt. Novikov orders them to investigate. Dmitri, a Soviet propagandist who is filming the mission, interviews the soldiers and documents the proceedings. As they draw closer to the designated coordinates, Dmitri takes an interest in and films several odd occurrences, such as unexplained dead Nazis, a burnt convent full of massacred nuns and strange machinery. When the soldiers arrive at their destination, they find an abandoned church guarded by an undead person with metal implants; the film calls these creatures zombots in the credits. The zombot kills Sgt. Novikov, and, after they destroy the zombot, Sergei takes charge. The hotheaded Vassili challenges his authority, but the others back Sergei.
Au début du XX siècle, dans un monde où l'alchimie est une activité extrêmement développée et respectée, deux frères, Edward (Ryōsuke Yamada ) et Alphonse Elric, tentent une technique secrète de transmutation humaine. L'expérience tourne cependant mal et Alphonse perd son corps tout entier tandis qu'Edward perd sa jambe gauche. Ce-dernier sacrifie alors son bras droit pour sauver l'âme de son frère en l'attachant à une armure de métal. Il reçoit ensuite des prothèses mécaniques appelées « automail » en remplacement de ses membres manquants.
Abandoned by their father deep in a forest, young Hansel and Gretel enter a gingerbread house and are captured by a cannibalistic witch. The witch forces Hansel to continuously eat candy to fatten him up, and enslaves Gretel, ordering her to prepare the oven, but the siblings outsmart her and incinerate her in the fire of the oven. In the fifteen years that follow, Hansel and Gretel become famed witch hunters, slaying hundreds of witches. The pair find that they are somehow immune to spells and curses, but the incident in the gingerbread house has left Hansel diabetic. He needs a shot of insulin every few hours or he will get sick and die.
In 1944, the Nazis build a dimensional portal off the coast of Scotland. With the help of Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, they intend to free the Ogdru Jahad—monstrous entities imprisoned in deep space—to aid them in defeating the Allies. Rasputin knows this will be an apocalyptic event that he believes will create a paradise. He opens the portal with the aid of his disciples, Ilsa von Haupstein and Obersturmbannführer Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, member of the Thule Society and Adolf Hitler's top assassin. An Allied team is sent to destroy the portal, guided by young Trevor Bruttenholm, who is well-versed in the occult. The German team is killed and the portal is destroyed—in the process absorbing Rasputin—while Haupstein and Kroenen escape. The Allied team discovers that an infant demon with a right hand of stone came through the portal; they dub him "Hellboy" and Bruttenholm adopts him.
In 1931, 12-year-old Hugo Cabret lives in Paris with his father, a widowed, but kind and devoted master clockmaker. Hugo's father takes him to see films and loves those of Georges Méliès best of all.
The film is set in 1980s Moscow. Standing right in the city centre on Kalinin Prospekt, a barefoot man dressed in a tattered coat appeals to anyone with a strange request: "Tell me the number of your planet in the tenture? Or least the number of your galaxy in the spiral?". Random passers-by, two Soviet citizens previously unknown to each other ("Uncle Vova", a gruff construction foreman from Moscow, Vladimir Mashkov, and a "Violinist", a student from Georgia, Gedevan Aleksidze), start a conversation with him, during which the stranger shows them an alien teleportation device – "traveller". The foreman Mashkov holds out his hand to the device and, despite the stranger's warnings, presses a random button. Suddenly Uncle Vova and the violinist find themselves alone on the desert planet "Pluke" in the "Kin-dza-dza" galaxy. From that point on, the movie describes their long quest to find a way back home.
In London in the year 1907, a British aristocrat named Sir Anthony Ross (Donald Sinden) hastily arranges an expedition to the Arctic to search for his lost son Donald. Donald had become lost on a whaling expedition to find the fabled island where whales go to die.