Co-produced by, among others, Night Watch/Day Watch director Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton, 9 is a beautifully animated (in CGI) but narratively compromised fable about – sort of – societal cooperation and the virtues of steampunk stitchery over cyberpunk soldering. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell what the moral message is, other than “it’s good to work together to achieve your goals” or “don’t press random buttons unless you know what they might do.” What 9 inarguably is is a feature-length retelling of director Acker’s 2005 Academy Award-nominated short film of the same name (which can be viewed in its entirety here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IQcMeNh7Hc). As in the original, the principal characters – numbered 1 through 9 – are stitched-together mechanical rag dolls in varying degrees of soiled disuse, existing in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Humanity, we discover, has gone to war with its machines, and the machines won. 9, voiced with just the right amount of curious trepidation by Wood, awakes one day in a dusty cupola, the long-dead body of his inventor below him and a world of peril (and ingeniously detailed animation) just outside the window. Initially voiceless, 9 goes off in search of, well, anything, and discovers another similar patchwork automaton, the kindly 2 (Landau), who is able to fix 9’s broken voicebox before being attacked and carried away by a robotic cat-thing that looks, to its creator’s credit, like a cross between a Joel-Peter Witkin painting and Burton’s kidhood Erector Set. Acker’s original was a darkly whimsical blend of CGI wizardry and silent film tropes that worked together to create something finer and more beautiful than the sum of its 11 minutes. This expanded version only suffers, albeit in grim visual splendor, from the extrapolation. New characters (and sometimes, but not always, their relevant backstories) are introduced and expanded upon, but such additions only serve to expose the seams in what was previously a seamlessly magical tale (a narrative problem that producer Burton has been battling at least since he turned a batch of cool Sixties bubble-gum cards – Mars Attacks! – into a colorful, feature-length mess).
This article appears in September 11 • 2009.