From Time to Time

Inside the Visionarium, a meticulous robot called the Timekeeper runs trials on a newly built machine and decides the safest way to test it is to send his assistant, the robot 9-Eyes, through time. The experiment succeeds and 9-Eyes winds up jumping across multiple eras before settling in the nineteenth century, where the author Jules Verne discovers her. When the Timekeeper goes back to retrieve his colleague, he also brings Verne along, and the bewildered writer is offered a passage to a future he never imagined. The film keeps its focus on the initial mishap and the immediate consequences of transporting a creative mind out of his own century, without revealing any later surprises or outcomes.

Directed by Jeff Blyth and released in 1992, the project features prominent voice talent, including Jeremy Irons as H.G. Wells, Gérard Depardieu, Michel Piccoli, Michel Leeb and Myriam Boyer, suggesting a European production with a literary bent rather than a mainstream Hollywood release.

Box office figures and commercial reach for this title are not widely documented, indicating a limited or niche theatrical run and little presence in major box office records.

Because it stages encounters between famous speculative writers and a mechanical time device, the film has attracted occasional attention from fans of literary science fiction and collectors of unusual animated or voice-driven works. Its casting of well known actors voicing historical authors makes it a curiosity that pops up in retrospectives about literary portrayals in genre cinema.

Critical reaction is scarce and formal reviews are hard to find, which matches its low profile among general audiences. The movie looks at the implications of sending technology and imagination across eras, touching on creativity, curiosity and the oddities that happen when past and future meet. Viewers interested in modest, idea-driven science fiction and in personifications of literary figures will likely find its premise more intriguing than its visibility suggests.