9
Shane Acker
Focus Features
Like the doll-like creations that populate 9, animator Shane Acker’s directorial debut, the film is spectacularly and imaginatively designed, but also feels incomplete and emotionally stagnant.
Expanded from Acker’s Oscar-nominated animated short, 9 is a bold and ambitious first feature.
It’s set in a dismal and decimated industrial landscape, after mankind has been demolished by hyperactive machines. The only inhabitants left in this wasteland are “stitchpunks,” tiny rag dolls with metallic hands, bodies patched up with cloth, binocular eyes and numbers emblazoned on their backs.
9 is a bona-fide masterpiece. Acker is an assured animator who has created some fascinating visuals. The hazy backgrounds have the haunting, oozing qualities of a Salvador Dali painting, and the film’s numerous creatures are stitched with meticulous detail. The beasts in this film have such imaginative structure and movement, we can only wish that Acker dethrones Michael Bay as the director of future Transformers movies.
9 also zips along at a breakneck pace, ensuring that many of the action sequences are downright thrilling.
However, at only one and a quarter hours, there’s too much frantic violence and not enough character development.
There is a time for action and mayhem and a time to break from the action and mayhem and enhance our interest in the story and characters. 9 unfortunately leaves these latter moments aside.
There is, however, one cheerful scene where many of the stitchpunks find a record player, put on the classic “Over the Rainbow,” and get a chance to dance with each other.
It is a beautiful moment and a much-needed change of pace for the characters, but unfortunately right after the film returns to nonstop violence.
While 9 is too intense for younger audiences, the film’s rudimentary dialogue is geared towards children. The lines, at certain points, seem to have been mechanically programmed for these characters and feel remarkably plain and unnatural.
If 9 will be remembered for anything, it will be as a sharply-crafted debut from a young visionary. While its technical aspects are stunningly complex and entirely dazzling, the story elements and characters remain too generic to ensure that the film can be remembered as anything more.