Review

Review Date: 13-September-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

9 (2009)

9 is a great little movie for getting away, for slipping out of reality and fleeing to fanciful lands. Originally created as an animated short (now expanded to an animated not-so-long), it envisions a world where the human race has been exterminated by vicious machines of its own making. Warfare destroyed most of the machines as well but a few remain to terrorize the only other survivors: a band of tiny beings who were fashioned out of sackcloth and imbued with life by a mystical device. The movie takes its name from the ninth and last of these creations, who wakes into consciousness after the rest and surveys the blasted landscape with distress. He is voiced by Elijah Wood, no stranger to fanciful lands.

9 quickly finds the others of his kind, but not before one of them is snatched by the enemy. The story centers on his determination to save his fellows no matter the risk. While he gains an ally in the ragged number 5 (John C. Reilly), he meets resistance from the imperious number 1 (Christopher Plummer) whose inclination is to flee and hide. It is always fascinating in movies where the characters' appearance is limited only by imagination how deliberately that appearance is rendered. The unlikable elder is the only character without the big, round, curious eyes that make the others so endearing (well, except for number 8, who is an oaf), and a large part of one's engagement with the story is the visual appeal of its heroes. I wish there were an action figure for sweet, tormented number 6, who would sit quite nicely on my desk alongside Gromit and mounted Eomer.*

If the short version of 9 had not come out the same year that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published, I would suspect that filmmaker Shane Acker borrowed the horcrux idea for his conclusion. Whatever the origin, the notion of soul fragments lends the movie a spiritual air as 9 and his friends take stock of the sacrifices made to secure themselves a future. (The bulk of the movie being their David-and-Goliath battles with machines, sacrifices are inevitable.) Their future bears little resemblance to happily ever after. Nevertheless, in its small scope 9 feels like a fully realized adventure.

*I was surprised to find 9 action figures on the Internet. They appear to be limited to characters 1 and 9.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.