A lot of big names got attached to ‘9’. Director Shane Acker was no doubt thoroughly excited to have that be the case. Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, and John C. Reilly, among other notable actors, were cast as voices, which is a lot of credit to an animated film like this one.
Tim Burton, director of ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, and Timur Bekmambetov, director of ‘Wanted’, produced the film. And for something that was originally an 11-minute animated short, the cast and crew have definitely made a special film out of it.
I just can’t shake the feeling it could have been so much better. The setting is Earth, in the dystopian aftermath of a devastating war between man and robots (essentially the ending to the Matrix) except that the machines killed every living thing on the planet with gas and eventually ran out of power, save for a handful.
The film centers on marionettes of sorts made of burlap and simple circuitry and infused with life by the world’s last super-scientist in the last days of humanity, who gave up his life to his creations.
These little abominations are called ‘stitch punks’ by Acker, but it is never brought up in the movie, and I refuse to call them as such.
It’s just unnecessary. Number 9 (Wood) wakes up at the beginning of the movie, is discovered by other rag dolls with preceding numbers, and joins the struggle to save them and outlive the last robots on the planet.
I haven’t actually watched the original short film that inspired the full-length one, but I get the feeling that it’s something that would be better if kept short, sweet, and with as little dialogue as necessary.
As something that’s 99 minutes long (oh, how tactful) it doesn’t seem to hold as much. But I suppose, by the very concept of the film (humanity being long dead due to greed and the comparison of cold industrialization to living things) I expected something more artsy.
Visually, ‘9’ was nice to look at, but I’ve seen better detail given to animated movies of its kind. My problem isn’t really with the art direction, though, as much as it is with the intent of the movie itself. Acker could have made this full-length film a beautiful, artistic sort of movie in a somewhat dystopian way.
However, ‘9’ insisted on having too much unnecessary explanation in the dialogue, sexual tension between little fake people made of thread, and a very flimsy plot that kept insisting the viewer go along with it.
Any artistic attempt it might have made was crushed by the fact that it desperately wanted to tell a story that wasn’t necessary to enjoy the film to begin with.
Despite the star power of the film, I really couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it, because a film’s voices and big-name producers don’t necessarily make the film good.
I anticipated this movie because I thought it would become something beautiful and philosophical about what hell we put our world through and what it really means to have a soul.
I thought it would tug at my heart to see something as inhuman as a toy made of burlap traverse the world as its last living creature. I yearned to be shown the melancholy of what we will leave behind long after we’re all gone from this world.
I suppose all of that is in ‘9’ somewhere, but it’s overshadowed by the glaring image of just another mediocre, albeit good-looking sci-fi adventure movie. I left the theatre content, but inevitably unimpressed.