9

9 (***)

Animation is expensive, and certainly a minute's worth of sophisticated CGI is going to cost more in money and manpower than the average minute from a live action movie. As such, its understandable why 9 is a scant 79 minutes long, a length roughly comparable to the beloved stop-motion animated movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. However, unlike Nightmare--produced by Tim Burton, as was 9--79 minutes simply isn't enough time for 9 to really effectively tell its story. Its a movie trying to be a big, sprawling, epic crammed into the package of a tiny, barely feature-film length movie. Granted it does tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, but all of it feels rushed, developing at break-neck speed, not in an "I'm on the edge of my seat with excitement!" sort of way, but a "Holy crap, give me a second to stop and catch by breath!" sort of way. The world that director Shane Acker and the animation team have created is intriguing and darkly beautiful, but we barely get a chance to really walk through more than a tiny fraction of it. The movie isn't unenjoyable, but certainly left me thinking about what it could have been as much as what it actually is after its done.

The movie draws you in immediately with a great hook: In the opening shots we see a little human-shaped doll figure made of cloth being stitched up. The scene fades, and when it fades back in, we see the humanoid figure hanging by one arm to the top of some sort of a circular tube. Suddenly, it springs to life, jumps down, and studies its surroundings with its two big, metal, cylindrical eyes, lined with curved white flaps that rotate in and out--the way circular doors close on spaceships in sci-fi movies--to simulate a pupil expanding and contracting. On his back is a big black number: "9". Peering over the table the construct finds himself on, he sees a dead body sprawled out on the floor, various papers scattered all around him. We suppose its his creator, but who was he exactly? There's a circular shaped object adorned with strange symbols on the ground that 9 seems compelled to pick up. Carrying it within himself via the zipper that traverses down his front side, 9 makes his way to the window, and gets a view of the bombed out city that he finds himself in. He tries to call for help, but finds he's unable to speak.

Eventually, 9 makes his way out of the building and onto the ground, where he meets 2, another construct like him, although apparently with some vision problems, as he has one giant (relative to him) eyeglass lens pulled over his face. 2 seems to know a bit about how each of them was created. He rummages through a trash heap and finds a voice box suitable for 9, and after some quick tweaking, 9 is speaking in the voice of Elijah Wood. While marveling the craftsmanship of 9's design, seemingly an upgrade on his own, he's ensnared by the "The Beast", a big robotic monster which is built in the shape of, and acts like, a wolf or a big-ass dog. 9, however, is barely able to escape and finds himself in the company of a few more numbered companions. There's 5 (John C. Reilley), who had part of his "face" blown off back when the world was still in the process of being bombed to smithereens and has a big sewn-on patch and a missing eye, 8, the tank of the party if you will, who's big and slow-witted and at one point seems to get high off of a magnet, 6, who is seemingly crazy and draws the same strange images over and over again and posts them everywhere, and 1 (Christopher Plummer) the old, wise (or maybe not so wise?) leader. Later on, we meet 7, who, seemingly just because, is a "woman," represented by the fact that she's voiced by Jennifer Connolly and is made of a slightly different shade of leather. She also wears a bird skull as a helmet. Whatever. 9 wants to go out and save 2, however 1 strictly forbids it, telling 9 that basically you're as good as dead when The Beast gets you, and that those that are still alive are alive because they've remained in hiding. 9, apparently capable of making complex life decisions a couple of hours after springing to life, decides he's going after 2 anyway, and 5 decides to come with out of a sense of duty to 2, who saved him back in the day. The most intriguing characters (or are they one character?) come later as well, the 3s: a set of twins who endlessly catalog any objects they come across, which they do by flashing morse code-like messages between them by flickering the lights in their eyes. I'm not sure what it says that the characters I found the most compelling are the ones who never speak. I don't have anything against what any of the voice actors did with their roles, I just think that more often than not, their characters don't get a whole lot to say that's interesting.

Eventually, our heroes force a final showdown with The Beast, actually not that far into the movie, and later on there are final showdowns with other, still more fearsome, mechanical creatures. Some of these action sequences have some fun moments, and one of the villanous robots--a spider-like shape that has half of a baby doll with glowing red eyes inside of it--is genuinely terrifying. There's also a clear resolution to the story, and most of the questions posed at its outset are answered, but the emotional climax isn't really all that stirring. There's only so much we can get attached to these bits of metal gears and leather sacks in 79 minutes, especially when a big chunk of those 79 minutes is them running away from various giant mechanical terrors. I wanted the movie to stop a breathe for a minute, and explore more of the post-apocalyptic world created for us, the way Wall-E stopped to show us a day in Wall-E's life alone on earth before getting on with the main plot that had him and Eve roaming around the mothership of the humans. The movie isn't unenjoyable, and the animation is excellent, I just feel as though better use could've been made of the imaginative world that the animation produced.