It's taken decades, but it finally feels as if mainstream American moviegoers are warming to the fact that animation can be used for something other than entertaining the kiddies. Thank Saturday-morning cartoons, Walt Disney's hang-up with fairy tales, or that "waskally wabbit" Bugs Bunny, but the fact is that somewhere along the line we stopped taking the art form seriously, dismissing it as a container for all things juvenile rather than embracing it as a creative means of exploring adult issues and themes. Shane Acker's exciting, inventive feature debut is a film that addresses some pretty weighty issues -- the collapse of humanity and the importance of questioning authority, among other things -- but does so in an intelligent, entertaining manner that proves we need not "shut off our brains" to be entertained. And with action sequences so artfully executed that they remind us how exciting movies can be when filmmakers actually make an effort to be coherent, 9 is the kind of imaginative adventure that stimulates both the eyes and the intellect.
In a world parallel to our own, war between humans and robots has scorched the earth, and mankind is no more. From the ashes of destruction emerges a courageous burlap doll named 9 (voice of Elijah Wood), whose unique leadership skills could prove the key to survival for those who have not yet perished. Perhaps with a little help from his friends -- who include domineering war veteran 1 (voice of Christopher Plummer), aging inventor 2 (voice of Martin Landau), stout mechanic 5 (voice of John C. Reilly), visionary artist 6 (voice of Crispin Glover), and fearless warrior 7 (voice of Jennifer Connelly) -- 9 can defeat the army or robots that threatens their very existence, and lay the groundwork for a hopeful future.
Grim from the get-go and flush with nightmare imagery, 9 is that rare animated film that gives discerning moviegoers more than just eye-popping visuals. No doubt fans will be using the film to show off their high-end home theater systems for years to come, but the true beauty of 9 lies not in the animators' ability to dazzle us (a job which they perform with the utmost talent and competence), but the filmmakers' talents as storytellers. The seeds of 9 were planted in Acker's Oscar-nominated 2005 short of the same name. Here, he's teamed with screenwriter Pamela Pettler to expand the story to feature length, enriching its thought-provoking subtext while making the action even more cinematic than before. With a central conflict that essentially boils down to intelligence versus soul (or the brain versus the heart), Acker and Pettler use the destruction of our world as a springboard to exploring the dangers of placing too much faith in any one solution to our many problems. When a genius scientist (voice of Alan Oppenheimer) realizes the mistake he's made in creating sentient machines with the power to self-replicate (and trusting that they would be used for the betterment of society), he attempts to compensate by creating tiny burlap dolls and instilling them with the essence of his own soul. After the fighting between man and machine heralds the fall of humanity, it's up to the scientist's most inspired invention to defeat his most technologically sound one. But before 9 can face the machines, he must first shed light on the secrecy that threatens to keeps his people cowering in the dark, and learn how to use his creator's most powerful weapon.
These days, it's fairly easy to make a visually arresting computer-animated film. The technology may not permit images to be quite photorealistic, but give a filmmaker a decent budget and a team of talented artists, and odds are decent that you'll get a project that looks pretty impressive regardless of the content therein. And this is the point where Acker and company succeed where most have failed; they realize that a pretty picture can't distract us from the absence of content for the entire running time, so they wisely flesh out the storyline with informative asides (such as an exciting newsreel detailing the rise of the robots) and clever commentary on the politics of fear. But there's still some mystery to the story, too. Quirky bits -- such as the one involving the bullish 8 and a magnet -- fly by with seemingly little significance, yet still enhance the story by allowing our own minds to fill in some of the gaps. Acker and Pettler obviously realize that buying in to a story about puppets with human souls requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and their decision to have a little fun with us ensures that 9 will be a unique experience for each individual viewer. Curmudgeonly critics like to complain that contemporary filmmakers tell stories that lack originality and craft films that leave far too little to the imagination; thankfully, there are some directors, like Acker, who are more than capable of proving them wrong. leave a comment --Jason Buchanan