Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
...none, but you'll hear the voices of...
Elijah Wood
Martin Landau
Christopher Plummer
John C. Reilly
Crispin Glover
Jennifer Connelly
Directed by:
Shane Acker
This movie has been pimped up by the names of Tim Burton and the almighty Timbur Bekmambetov, who said they "brough" 9 to you. A buckload of starts doing voice-overs, two great directors all over this movie, what can go wrong?
Let's see. Despite not being unpleasant to watch, I could've used the eighty minutes I've watched this movie to do something better. Tell yourself that. It's never good when you have to powernap in the middle of a movie...
STORYTELLING
Humanity is on the verge of extinction (real original I know). The machines, they once endeared have turned against them and exterminated mankind (oh, no way?) Here's the original bits though. In order to survive, humans have transfered their souls into cousins of Playstation's mascot Sackboy. Little sacks are few and far between. The hand-numbered friends are roaming throught the wasteland.
In the sack-community, two schools of thoughts are facing off. 1 (Plummer), who's conservative, thinking about the safety of the others first and 2 (Landau), the creative genius who seeks to better up the fate of his friends and the two leaders of the community. When 2 gets captured because of 9(Wood)'s error. He embarks on a journey along with his friend 5 (Reilly) in order to find him again.
Unable not to fuck up, 9 awakens a machine of mass destruction called Brain, who's plan is to kill as much cloth-skinned little people as he can. That's basicallt your story right there. 9 keeps fucking up because he's innocent and all and his friends come to the rescue to patch things up.
DIRECTION
It's a very cute movie. Despite being cruelly unoriginal, it's cute. The sack people are hand made and you can see the sewing marks on their bodies. Their universe is scaled down so objects of their old everyday life are now as vital to them as cars or planes. It's cute to see a bucket used as an elevator, but he'll, it's been done a thousand times before.
The universe had a good apocalypse feeling to it, which some will appreciate. It's no half-baked wasteland and you feel it's been mangled by wars. Direction in animation movies is used most of the times to follow the narration, but when the narration doesn't amount to anything, you have a movie that stalls.
ACTING
You probably figured out by now that terrific voice acting is 9's redemption. The cast lives up to its reputation. Crispin Glover as the artistic and tormented 6 does a particularly touching job. Landau feels old and vulnerable (I guess he is) and also fits his character quite well. Plummer closes the podium, playing a believable coward.
It's hard to analyze acting performances when there are no actors and even no great scenes to remember. Elijah Wood as token cute protagonist, Jennifer Connelly as token women character and John C. Reilly as token sidekick are all good, but not unforgettable. They are so typecasted to death that it's just another one in the pile.
INTEREST
Heck, come to think about it, that movie was pretty bad. The script was not funny the way Pixar's are, the story was not particularly moving or insightly, the direction had nothing to it that wasn't done before. Save for the army of good actors that challenged the odds and blew a little bit of life into that movie, 9 was...a waste of time.
It's not a triumph of imagination like some would say. It's no Ice Age or Ratatouille. We're a hundred thousand miles away from the environmental tales of Hayao Miyazaki. Good setting, good acting, but all there is on the screen for eighty minutes are muppets giggling without purpose.
NOTE: C
