Humankind has been destroyed by the very technology intended to maintain peace, but nine burlap sack dolls (coined ""stitchpunks"") survive the destruction in Shane Acker's post-apocalyptic CGI animated film, ""9."" Together, the stitchpunks must avoid the clutches of the soulless machines that annihilated human civilization.
#9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), curious and loyal, is the last to wake from the dolls' previously eternal slumber. Among the group are # 7 (voiced by Jennifer Connolly), a fearless and compassionate fighter, # 5 (voiced by John C. Reilly), a kind and trusting mechanic and # 1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer), a skeptical and manipulative curmudgeon. Other vocal talents include Martin Landau, Crispin Glover and Fred Tatasciore.
The animation is visually stunning, providing the audience with a unique variety of textures, extreme detail and myriad explosions. With its PG-13 rating, perhaps it is best suited for younger teens who have outgrown Pixar charm but aren't quite ready for live-action graphic violence, or adults who want to be impressed by the more visual aspects and befuddled with the film's failure to tell a complete story.
""9"" was originally an 11-minute short film by then-student Acker, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2005. With producers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of ""Wanted""), Acker elongated the short by 70 minutes. Knowing this information is important in identifying the film for what it is: a somewhat interesting premise with amazing graphics (which could have been established in say, 11 minutes), but with a storyline that is sloppily thrown together and severely lacking substance.
The film, with a few exceptions, is essentially a series of intense action scenes with little to no real connections between them. Flat, repetitive dialogue tends to mask narrative voids, and the eye-popping visuals can function as a distraction from plot insignificance. Character development of non-human heroes in a post-apocalyptic world was much more successful in ""WALL-E,"" whose nonverbal cues had much more to say than most of the lifeless dialogue spoken by the stitchpunks.
And just as the nine are made of recycled material (burlap sacks, thread and zippers), many of the film's characters and themes seem to have been borrowed from movies of years past. The Seamstress is a menacing burlap monster with a hybrid body of the boogeyman and toy snake from ""The Nightmare Before Christmas"" and a face reminiscent of the spider doll from ""Toy Story."" An explanation to a big mystery throughout the movie seems as if it was straight out of the most recent ""Harry Potter"" installment. The presented themes are hardly new concepts either—questioning authority, sticking together and hating communists are among the many—but the dark overtones could have made them more evocative (or less trite) with a little narrative substance. What could have been a powerful conclusion was almost laughable due to this unfortunate lack of meaning.
The Scientist (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer), creator of the nine stitchpunks, concludes that society's ""blind pursuit of technology only sped us quicker to our doom."" Let's hope he wasn't also referring to the narrative future of CGI animated film.
