9 - Produced by Tim Burton

Director: Shane Acker (9 (2005; short))

Screenplay: Pamela Pettler

Story: Shane Acker

Cast: Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Crispin Glover

Length: 1h 20m

Synopsis: Thanks to mankind’s technological ambitions the world is now ruled by the machines it created. Man himself has long been extinct, and all that is left of actual life can be found in a small group of mechanical dolls that are the creations of the very scientist who helped spawn the race of machines that led to man’s demise. The goal of the living dolls becomes clear: survive at any cost and keep life alive.

Analysis: Much of what Shane Acker’s feature-length version of 9 has to offer can be taken at face value. In terms of character makeup and design not much has changed since Acker’s animated short of the same title that garnered an Oscar nomination back in 2005. The actual animation is expectedly more polished than before, but any comparisons to the work of Pixar or even Dreamworks that one might hear should be considered sardonic. But unlike the aesthetic attributes of the animation, most of all else about the film can be considered thin depending on how closely you care to look at it.

The narrative attempts to stand upright by primarily using a straightforward brand of representationalism. The incorporation of the numbered dolls easily reminds one of Marry Shelly’s Frankenstein, being that they are the life-given products of a scientist’s labor, but unlike that story we are told explicitly here that these dolls do in fact possess souls – or to be more precise, nine separate parts of one soul (that of their scientist). So, it is easy to see that each doll’s persona represents a specific side of the scientist’s (courage, fortitude, resourcefulness, craziness, blind fear, etc.). Recognizing these correlations would not be difficult even without the film spelling it out for you, but understanding the significance behind constructing these relationships in this way requires one to speculate heavily.

One way of interpreting the film is to view it as a conflict between mass/pop culture and counterculture. Pop culture’s (i.e. the “machine’s”) goal, it seems, is to establish itself as being dominant by way of completely eradicating all secular brands of counterculture (the dolls). If this is the case then the film shows a clear sympathy for counterculture. The lone principal machine attempts to rule the world with the help of its own mechanical creations (i.e. superficially created pseudo-countercultures) while the dolls, which share a collective soul and possess tangible personalities, merely seek to stay alive. When the machine shows the ability to absorb the partial soul from a numbered doll, it (as pop culture) then establishes itself as a threat to destroy, or at least severely reduce the strength and power of the dolls (i.e. the influence and relevancy of counterculture; One such historical example of this kind of absorption would be the popularization of blue jeans). With this relationship in mind the film raises other intriguing questions about how this conflict can be resolved, how it should be resolved, and what kind of repercussions are at stake depending on which outcome results. 9 offers itself as a simple, thin allegorical veil that can be slanted and looked at from a variety of angles. With movies like this it can be generally said that there is as much value to it as one puts into it – at least to a greater degree than most films. On the surface it is nothing much to drool over, but the deeper you look into it the more interesting perspectives you’ll uncover.

Rating: 7.0