9 is an animated feature with a history. Originally developed as an award-winning short, it's now been expanded into a feature film with fleshed-out characters and a world of mysteries and dangers to explore. The backstory of the post-apocalyptic, post-human world in which the stitch-punk characters find themselves is hinted at in the movie, but fleshed out much more fully in the lab of the 9 scientist who created them, an elaborate viral web-site that has expanded considerably since it first went online a few months ago.
One cool feature of the site is the series of symbols at the bottom of the page. By clicking on a symbol, you can hear Elijah Wood (the voice of 9) narrating bits of the 9 world's pre-history. In one of the latest installments he reveals part of what went wrong:
Tortured and angry, the fabrication machine lashed out, It began to self-program the machines to indiscriminately kill any sign of life they encountered. The machines went berserk, poisoning the Earth with gas bombs.
Some nicely-stylized sketches from that final war have popped up online as well. And while it was a final war for the humans, the malevolent machines seem to be carrying on, as we can see in another new clip from the movie.