Well, never let it be said I won’t try anything kinda weird and unusual. The animated feature 9 was set to leave Netflix, like, yesterday, so I took it in for my Sunday movie. I have far too many movies on my watchlists that need trimming once and a while anyway. But 9? A weird CGI animated feature where what looks like animated rag dolls fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic world?
Oh, there are far stranger things out there than that. Why not?
After a bit of opening narration from a scientist of some kind, the small living rag doll that is 9 (voice of Elijah Wood) wakes up to find his creator dead, the house nearly destroyed, and nothing but uninhabitable wasteland as far as the eye can see. He has a device of some kind stuffed into his inner folds, but he doesn’t really seem to know much of anything about the world he lives in. Fortunately, he soon finds another of his kind, this one with the personality of a kindly old man named 2 (Martin Landau), and after some quick repairs, a robot cat attacks the pair, running off with 2 and leaving 9 alone again. He then finds a colony of sorts where he’s fixed up by clumsy, cowardly, one-eyed 5 (John C. Reilly) before the brutish 8 (Fred Tatasciore) takes him to see the leader, 1 (Christopher Plummer). 1 believes the only thing to do is run and hide from the killer machines out there.
However, 9 thinks he needs to try and rescue 2. He’ll get some help from 5, some more from fighter of the group 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and confirmation of some theories from the artistic 6 (Crispin Glover) and the silent twins 3 and 4. The Master Machine is set to take the lot of them out and finalize its control over the world, and only a handful of flimsy-looking animated rag dolls may have the power to stop it. The only questions are how and what do they do if they actually succeed?
This was one freaky movie, and despite the looks of the characters and the animation, this didn’t seem to be a kid friendly movie. Heck, the only humans seen for most of the movie that aren’t some kind of flashbacks are a few corpses in the early going. What 9 and the survivors of his group do to save the day is a big ambiguous at best. Something potentially good will come of all this, but it’s not like 9 can hit a magical reset button and bring everything back to the way it was or there’s some resistance group out there fighting the machines that run the world. The human race is dead and gone and the only real remnants are these rag doll robot things.
Instead, what we have here is a solid sci-fi in the form of a sort of steampunk setting. All the machines, be they 9 and the others or the enemy machines, look like items put together using whatever was available for raw materials. The master machine building the enemy robots isn’t above using animal skeletons as building blocks. Heck, 7 wears a bird’s skull for a helmet. The world is a mess, but the characters rummage around and find things. The setting also looks like it has a vaguely World War I aesthetic with a little bit of 50s sci-fi tossed in for good measure. Even if the story didn’t work, this is still a creative world to at least look at.
As for the story itself, it may not be the most original, but how much or how little you get out of a movie like 9 will probably greatly depend on how much you immerse yourself into the visuals. The visuals are, as I noted, rather impressive. The group of oddballs saving the world is not particularly original, and some things are left implied rather than explained. I don’t mind implied, but others might. I also tend to like amazing visuals, so something like this goes a much longer way with me than it might with others. Use your own discretion.
Grade: B
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