By Keith Staskiewicz
The season of animation is upon us. The hotly-anticipated new feature 9, not to be confused with the upcoming musical Nine nor the German negative “Nein!” arrived yesterday in theaters on 9/9/09, making it the most numerologically apt release date since the June 6, 2006 unleashing of the Omen remake.
And after 9, the deluge. From now until the end of the year we’ll be seeing an unprecedented avalanche of animation hitting mainstream American cinemas, and one that demonstrates just how many formats can huddle in under the medium’s single umbrella. We’ll see a not-so-classic adaptation of a much-adapted classic, an eagerly awaited return to form, the ambitious realization of a long-gestated original vision, and a live-action auteur’s first foray into animation, among many others, brought to us via CGI, stop-motion, traditional hand-drawn cel, and the latest performance-capture technology. It’s a good time for animation fans.
9
Focus Features and Starz Animation
September 9
In between putting finishing touches on orcs and trolls for the Lord of the Rings at Peter Jackson’s famed Weta Workshop, Shane Acker worked for over four years on a short film that would eventually be nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. Now, another four years later, his meticulously imagined world of ragdoll protagonists, apocalyptic malaise and an entire mechanical ecosystem of things that go bump in the night, is coming to the big screen. 9 is produced by Tim Burton, a man who also likes his fairy tales on the darker side, and Timur Bekmambetov of Wanted fame, and features the voices of Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly. Expanding on the mythology established in the 11-minute short and giving vocal cords to the once silent characters, Acker follows nine sentient dolls as they try to unravel their own existence as well as the terrible fate that has befallen humanity, both of which might be tied together in what Acker has dubbed “a Geppetto/Oppenheimer figure.”
Expect the film to be dark and genuinely scary. I had the opportunity to speak with Acker a number of months ago and he emphasized his desire to lend the film a genuine aura of fear and peril: “What I’m trying to evoke here is fairy tales, the real ones. They were moral tales and there needed to be severe consequences to teach those lessons. (In) some of these animated films nowadays, you don’t feel like there are any stakes. It’s set up so much as a series of gags. You don’t really feel the nature of the threat. But I tried to make that threat present in 9.” The TV ads have warned that 9 is “definitely not your little brother’s animated movie,” which sucks for my little brother, because he, like myself, thinks it looks totally badass.
Read more »
