Film Review: Tim Burton Presents Shane Acker's "9"

It was only last summer that "WALL-E" told us to be kind to our fellow plants, and now we have "9″ - an illustration of humanity's impending doom at the hands of our own greed and military pursuits. While "WALL-E" was a sweet film for the whole family, "9″ has earned itself a PG-13 rating due to it's dark monstrosity of a world. The problem? Eighty minutes is not long enough to invest in nine personalities, and it's not short enough to retain the awe-striking power of it's visuals throughout the entirety of the picture.

When 9 (Elijah Wood) is awakened, he's an intruder in an unknown world - one with a war-torn landscape, decomposing bodies strewn across the ground, and fellow canvas puppets wondering the broken streets. After he meets 2 (Martin Landau), an intelligent and resourceful companion, a skeletal cat with glowing red eyes makes it's presence known. The scuffle leads to 2's kidnap, and he will serve as the ingredient to awaken a much smarter, and much more menacing machine.

9 wishes to save 2, and so he does his best to recruit his newly-found family for the task: 1 (Christopher Plummer), their ignorant and fearful leader, 5 (John C. Reilly), a one-eyed kind-hearted oaf, and 7 (Jennifer Connelly), a masterful swords-woman with a helmet constructed out of a bird's skull. They're up against an arachnid machine with a glowing red eye, an intelligent creation with the ability to create it's own diabolical henchmen.

The director is Shane Acker, a young man who graduated from UCLA and received an Oscar nomination in 2006 for his animated short, "9″, which first introduced these sack people and their robotic foes. As much as it feels like a passion project visually, with it's vast world and the intricate detail found in each of his creations, there's not much meat on it's bones. Rather than saying anything remarkable and fully utilizing the depths of the science fiction genre, Acker settles for one single-minded action sequence after the other. It's safe to say that the film's best moments are the quiet ones, but those are so few and far between that it's not high praise.

The plot is simply serviceable, but there are many questions left unanswered. Why did this scientist create nine figures in his image, so frail and small, to go up against a machine with the sole intention of killing them? And why was this machine programmed to harvest souls in the first place? Such questions would be forgivable if the film had heart to go along with the action, but there's not much else to think about when you're staring at a never-ending blur of battle sequences.

"9″ should be praised for it's creativity - the animation is stunning, the art design is original, and the world is unpredictable. But no matter how pretty the film looks, it doesn't quite live up to the standards that better animated films have set with more engaging plots and memorable characters.