9
9 is the name/number of the main character, a burlap-covered creature who literally comes to life in the beginning of the film who must find his way through a landscape demolished by human war and sparsely populated by other numbered creatures and find a way to defeat the giant robotic machine that seems capable of sucking the soul out of whoever it encounters.
Anyone who saw the ads or posters for this movie might look at the funny-looking creatures on them and guess that this might be a kid’s film while they ignore the bleak backdrops these ragdolls occupy. This reflects the film quite accurately, in fact. This film dives into very heavy concepts: war, death, fear, humanity’s inner drive to create as well as destroy, even drug addiction, all serving as the setting for the adventure of these bizarrely cute little creatures.
The tone of this film is something you would expect from something with that involves Tim Burton (he executive produced) but it doesn’t feel like a film that would get the type of advertising exposure it has received. It’s a very atmospheric film, happy to let characters’ actions speak for them if at all possible. I like the fact that although they used many celebrities to provide voices (Elijah Wood as 9, Jennifer Connelly as 7, Christopher Plummer as 1, Crispin Glover as 6, John C. Reilly as 5), they are all very excellent actors who bring character to their roles and not just fall into the usual convention of ‘big-name actor lends voice to cartoon’.
When I was younger one of the major yearly events for me was when the animation festival would come to the local theater. It was always amazing to see the different styles and designs that animators could conjure onto the screen beyond what was fed to us on Saturday mornings and showed how truly versatile the art of animation was. However in doing so, the art could be raised above the story, which tended to be the most uneven part of the event. True, there was some brilliant pieces that could make me laugh much harder or reflect on concepts much more deeply than any live-action film could, but some films were so caught of in their visuals that the animators lost sight the story. I was reminded of these festivals when I was watching 9. This made even more sense when after doing some research I found that this was based on a short film from 2005 by director Shane Acker, one that most likely made the rounds in similar festivals, that served as the basis for this film (I’ve included the Youtube post of that film in this review). There’s a lot of questions about the characters and the world that both the short film and the feature film leave up in the air. While this works for the short film to keep focus on the main plot, it doesn’t quite work in the feature. There is a lot more room in the feature to expound on why things are the way they are so the audience doesn’t get lost and this room wasn’t used to it’s fullest capacity. A little mystery is good, of course, but I don’t think I had enough information or familiar ground to see why I should care about the creatures and their plight, and in one part of the story the characters’ actions actually made me lose quite a bit of sympathy for them and question why they would act this way in the first place.
This film is really beautiful, with a some imaginative visuals and some good action and distinctive characters, but I would have felt ripped off seeing this at evening price in the theater. It was worth seeing as a matinee and It might be worth the purchase of a download. However, this doesn’t really get beyond more than eye candy for me. It would have been nice to have an equally compelling story to match the visuals.
