By If “9” was a painting, it would hang in the Louvre.
The animation is stunning, and the detail, meticulous. Once the initial awe created by first-time director Shane Acker has passed, the thin story begins to unravel, leaving moviegoers with a taste of disappointment at what could have been a stunning film.
“9” tells the story of a ragtag group of three-inch tall cloth creatures as they attempt to survive a post-apocalyptic world.
Humans are gone, killed off in a war with machines, and an evil robotic beast hunting down our nine little heroes.
The strongest point of the film is its atmosphere. Between destroyed buildings, rusting monuments and decaying bodies, it is all here in this grisly, dark PG-13 cartoon.
Death and horror abound as the audience watches the cute little rag dolls writhe in pain as their souls are literally sucked out of them and devoured by the evil beast.
These soul-sucking machines are one of the film’s coolest aspects. While some of them are fairly direct rip-offs of the sentinels from “The Matrix” trilogy, most are absolutely chilling. Most of the machines’ appearances are based on terrifying representations of animals with knives for beaks, harpoon guns for tails, and a soul-sucking talisman for a mouth. The animators waste nothing in their quest to create some of the most frightening machines ever seen.
While the look and feel of the film is undoubtedly awesome, the story is where it starts to stumble. The original short was Acker’s UCLA senior thesis and is only 11 minutes long.
The short and the feature share nearly an identical beginning and end, so the majority of the feature is filled with stuff they just threw in to make it longer, without really changing anything from the overall goal of the story.
The original “9” was an excellent short adventure and a superb silent film, but as a feature the forced dialogue and awkward character relationships really start to wear as the film progresses. At only 79 minutes, I expected “9” to fly by, but an inflated story will always run out of gas, even if it only has to last for just under an hour and a half.
The number one thing that drives a movie, that holds it together, is a story. And without a solid story, “9” is just another exercise in animation.
