Nicholas Thurkettle

9
Director: Shane Acker
Writer: Story by Shane Acker, Screenplay by Pamela Pettler
Producers: Timur Bekmambetov, Tim Burton, Dana Ginsburg, Jinko Gotoh, Jim Lemley
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau, Fred Tatasciore, Alan Oppenheimer

How small and fragile these creatures are; and what ingenious courage they show in spite of it. 9, a visually-arresting animated film created by director Shane Acker, features tiny sentient burlap dolls with button eyes, which Acker dubs “stitchpunks”. They huddle like a lonely orphan family in the ruins of the world, wondering for what purpose their late father (a human scientist voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) created them; while out in fields of junk, a malevolent force stalks them.

The stitchpunks debuted in Acker’s Academy Award-nominated animated short of the same title, and already their evocative form and mechanical resourcefulness were well-established. In the short, though, they were mute; for this feature-length version – which expands on the story and provides an origin for them – they have voices, each one tinged with mourning and melancholy.

That sense of sadness and struggle in Acker’s apocalyptic vision packs a wallop – it’s like someone invaded the world of WALL*E and front-loaded it with even more pessimism and mortality. This distinguishes it in the field of American animation – it shows you can make a feature when you have more dreams than dollars, and in doing so you can also release the obligation to be all-ages sugar-y spectacle, and plumb other moods.
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