In brief:
9 is a reasonably entertaining animated film for teen-to-adult audiences with a unique visual style and some good voice acting. Shane Acker's debut film, based on his thesis project of the same name, is a pleasant diversion with a story that sort-of stumbles in the third act. That said, at 79 minutes you aren't going to feel like your precious time was misappropriated, and it'd be a nice renter if you have friends into Tim Burton, Invader Zim, the neighbor's toys from Toy Story, or Little Big Planet.
The slightly embellished version:
I enjoyed 9, for the most part. For a film that barely classifies as "feature length", director Shane Acker packs a lot of punch into the images, and it has the benefit of largely side-stepping most of the tropes/traps of "animated" films. That is to say that characters die, the menace is genuine for all of the leads, and in a broader sense, the landscape is probably littered with human corpses.
9 is a post-apocalyptic tale, set shortly after a war between humans and machines goes the way you'd expect it to (they don't really need us for battery power and we don't find time machines), and in the wake of mostly-Mutually Assured Destruction, a small band of living sack dolls are trying to make sense of their plight. How the sack dolls came to be and why is something I'll leave for a paragraph or two, but each one, numbered 1-9, have a different take on how to advance and what to do about the "beast" attacking them.
Our story begins in earnest when 9 (Elijah Wood) wakes up in the home of his very dead creator, confused and initially voiceless. He meets 2 (Martin Landau), who is captured by the "Beast", but 9 escapes and meets 5 (John C. Reilly), 1 (Christopher Plummer), 6 (Crispin Glover), and 8 (Fred Tatasciore). In an attempt to rescue 2 and discover the meaning of a talisman recovered from the Scientist's home, 9 is saved by 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and accidentally awakens the
Okay, that sounded a little snarky, which is unfair. When the sack dolls die, they die. And since there are only 10 speaking roles in the film (and three come from newsreel footage), when I say characters die, I mean major ones. That I'll give 9 credit for; this isn't the sort of cgi film to show to children, unless you've already weaned them on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Unless your kids like the scene where Oogie Boogie dies, then you might want to wait a little while before showing them 9. While bloodless, the gravity of death is not lacking from this film.
The origin of the sack dolls is really the only point where I fell off-board for the film. The world Acker creates manages to convey the scope and the desolation of a post-apocalyptic world (a genre the Cap'n is quite fond of), and each sack doll is immediately identifiable and memorable. The explanation for the film, and what the talisman that's causing so much trouble with the machine is was a little goofy to me. Without saying too much, it reminded me of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in a weird way, and the resolution of the film was maybe a little too pat. That might not be the case for the rest of you, but it was for me.
The voice cast were all very good, although they're all performing as their own voices, so it's not going to be hard to pick them out or anything. Before you ever hear 6 say anything you can guess that's the "Crispin Glover" character because he's a little crazy. 1 and 2 both look older than the other dolls so it's not tricky to figure out which one is Plummer and which one is Landau. But I digress; everyone is just fine, and they use their voices to augment the personalities of each doll. It never feels like celebrity stunt casting.
Make sure to check out Acker's thesis short film 9, the basis for the theatrical version. It hits many of the same story beats, but limits the threat only to the "Beast" and is done entirely without dialogue. The rest of the extras are honestly pretty limited, unless you're dying to know why Tim Burton or Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Wanted) were so keen on getting behind the film. Honestly, it's a fun movie and many of you will take to it more than I did.
side note: I was interested in the design and layout of the "Dictator" and machines that precede the main story. It's never stated anywhere directly in the film, but if you're looking carefully at the sign over the tunnel when 5 and 9 head in the first time, the language is German (note the word "Vorsicht"), which goes a long way towards explaining the curiously Third Reich-esque military garb and flags in the city. The cars tend to indicate that 9 is a steampunk variation on WWII / post-WWII history, although almost everything else written in the film is in English. Curious.
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