9

There were so many movies in the last year that came out called "9" or "Nine" or "District 9" its easy to get them all confused. This one I think got a little mixed up and forgotten.

Its not surprising that it was a little forgotten, it's rated PG-13, so there it knocks out the adult and kid crowd for the most part, leaving the teens and people in their twenties to pick up the slack, and honestly unless its Pixar I am willing to over look most animated films until they are released on DVD like I did this.

9 is the name of our main character, he is a robotic rag doll made of burlap and rudimentary robotics in a time that resembles the 1930's, in what we can presume is Paris based on the architecture and the presence of what appears to be Notre Dame. 9 wakes up in a room where there is a dead body and the world has basically been destroyed, he is maybe a foot tall at the most. When he begins to venture outside he finds another one like him named 2. When 2 is captured and taken away by a robot made up of metal and a cat skeleton its up to 9 and another robot who saves him named 5 to get 2 back. In this time we also meet 1, 6, and 8. The others we are told are dead. When going to save 2, 9 awakens something far worse and are now on the run from the real evil they've unleashed.

Along the way we learn more about what annihilated humanity and how the world became the ruins that it is now. Its a re-imagining of history, if we had made this huge jump in the 20's and 30's with robotics and artificial intelligence is this what might have happened? With the Nazi's as power hungry as they were its certainly a possibility.

The animation takes a few steps backwards and instead of getting glossy, or going for photo realism they rather go for a look of the drawings from the time of what the future would look like. The animation is certainly top notch, but they intentionally didn't make it flashy, the story didn't fit that and it would have taken away from the deeper message.

This is where I'm going to jump to some conclusions, and I could be wrong, but there is certainly plenty of stuff to go on in this to come up with some ideas of what they were going for. Not only is this a reflection on war and specifically WWII, but I think they were also taking a look at the Holocaust from a safer standpoint than making a movie directly about it. They mention the "Chancellor" a few times and how his use of the 'brain machine" resulted in it turning on us. They even show the "Chancellor" at one point and he looks plenty like Hitler. There are burning smokestacks in it, yes that's a stretch, but then couple that with the archway to the factory from where the smoke comes from looks a lot like the one over the entrance to Auschwitz then it makes a stronger case.

6 is made up of what appears to be the striped clothes many of the Jews and others prisoners were made to wear. The fact that they are numbered and that it is physically printed on them is a good example. Now like I said, I am jumping to conclusions, but all of this taken together and the fact that the time frame is somewhere close to the 30's and 40's of the last century it fits much better.

The voice acting was good, other than 9, who is voiced by Elijah Wood and 5, who was John C Reilly, I couldn't really tell who any of the rest of them were, later I found out that many of the other ones are voiced by people I know. It was short, a lot shorter than I would have hoped, they spent a lot of time creating this world, and we see a lot of it, but I wish they wouldn't have rushed the story along as much as they did, and spent some more time just around in the destruction. Then we as the audience could really soak it in. The designs of the robots were very inventive and imaginative. From the one that looks like a cat, to a dragon one, or a cobra one, they really made them look different from many other robots Ive seen in movies.

Its to dark to be a decent kids movie as compared to what is expected of kids movies today. I still think kids should be allowed to watch this, maybe for little kids it might be to much. It was a strong addition to the computer created animated film sub-genre. They made it more adult, hoping one day it might become more mainstream for older people to see animated movies. 8/10 stars.

Director: Shane Acker

Starring: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connellu