9
Directed by Shane Acker
Produced by Jim Lemley, Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov & Dana Ginsburg
Written by Pamela Pettler, based on a short story of Acker
Released by Focus Features
USA. 88 min. Rated PG-13
With the voices of Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly, Fred Tatasciore, Elijah Wood, Alan Oppenheimer, Tom Kane & Helen Wilson  
 

As you watch 9, an animated movie directed by Shane Acker (based on his Oscar-winning short), you can’t help feeling that it’s bad Tim Burton (and in some ways it is, as Burton serves as producer here). Despite some impressive, off-kilter art direction, the movie is a thin, watery meal of underwritten characters, botched action sequences, and—even with the plot’s post-apocalyptic grimness—pure Disney sentimentality you would expect from a former Disney cartoonist, like Burton.

9 begins as a burlap rag doll with metal eyes named 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) awakens to a desolated world where a war between humans and robots has destroyed all life. The only survivors are a handful of other rag doll robots (named 1 through 8) and the Beast, a vicious machine made from a cat skeleton that hunts down the other survivors.

The rag dolls follow a grumpy, mitered leader named #1 (speaking with Christopher Plummer’s soothing, dry tones), who lives in fear of the Beast and forces his community to hunker down inside a ruined cathedral (hence the miter, I guess). But when 9 joins the group, he shakes things up—while trying to rescue a rag doll captured by the Beast, 9 accidentally brings to life a robotic monster that threatens to destroy the world, again.

The art direction is, as I said, impressive. The film’s aesthetics appear to belong to the 1930s, but the technology is futuristic. In flashbacks, we see human rebels fighting hulking, two-legged robots that resemble SS helmets on stilts.  (We also can tell that the world government of the humans pre-apocalypse was evil because their fashions were fascist.)

While the movie’s visual style is enjoyable, if not especially clever (WWII symbolism is too easy), it’s wasted on a truly hokey story burdened with pat lessons about the virtues of curiosity, self-sacrifice, and other worthy things. And like virtually all animated CGI movies today, what passes for a plot is really a jerry-rigged circus of chase scenes, propelled not by conflicts arising naturally from the characters, but by anything at hand that can knock things in motion.

One scene sums up the movie’s contempt for storytelling logic: the hero, 9, has convinced another rag doll to go out exploring with him. At one point they become scared and are about to turn back, but they see a sand storm approach. “We can’t turn back,” says 9, so they go on ahead, although at the very next cut the sandstorm has fizzled down to a small draught. This might seem like a trivial detail, but it’s a telling example of the absurdity that results from the filmmaker’s narrative carelessness.

9 also never finds the right tone. It is probably too intense for kids (a dead child is seen in the first 10 minutes), but is certainly too simple-minded for adults. And ideas that might have made sense in Acker’s mind just baffle on screen (in one instance, human souls actually shoot into clouds and causing them to rain—and no, I’m not making this up). I suppose it’s pretty to look at while it lasts, and luckily it doesn’t last long. Brendon Nafziger
September 11, 2009