9

Drew's Thoughts:
Based on his Oscar-nominated short film, Shane Acker enlisted the talents of John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly and Tim Burton as a producer to expand the vision of his short into a feature length film.
Like Mary and Max, 9 avoids for the most part being a "children's movie" despite it being animated. Most young kids would probably just get confused watching it, cause I know I was. The film sort of plays out like The Terminator or The Matrix meets A Bug's Life. The characters of 9, these weird sack doll things, are fighting in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by machines. The story doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I like that the dolls are ragged and the machines are rusty and physical degradation pervades the animation design.
The title character played by Elijah Wood (each character name is a number 1-9) leads the effort against the machine and the dolls find that feuds within the group pose a threat just as much as the machines do. It's all somewhat standard post-apocalyptic stuff. The dialogue-less short was pretty good because, while the story was lacking, it had atmosphere and was only ten minutes long. With the full length they try to give explanations to why things happened, which the short avoided, and this movie fumbles those explanations pretty thoroughly. While I wouldn't say 9 makes many big missteps, aside from the weak story, and the animation is good, it also plays too much by the rules to stand out or seem special. Rather than being flawed but interesting like the original short, it's the usual mediocre, nonsensical sci-fi movie in animated clothing.