It's been a big year for the apocalypse, from the relentlessly grim wastelands of Terminator Salvation to the multi-pocalypse of 2012. What really sets director Shane Acker's vision of the end of the world apart from the others, according to what he told Sci-Fi Wire, is that 9 takes place in a alternate reality, so it's not exactly our world that has been destroyed:
It's this steampunk world that's fallen into disrepair that's been destroyed so it's as if the Victorian era or the industrial age had been allowed to progress for a couple hundred years beyond what it did. It's all analog. It's all pre-digital. It's a world that was in celebration of the machine and it's the kind of industrial revolution aesthetic where even within the machinery itself, there's ornamentation and there's beautiful detailing. So it's not about just practicality. It's about celebrating the mechanics and the industrial age. Then that world has collapsed.
The characters themselves are something different as well. They're rag dolls with their own unique aesthetic to go with the ruined post-Victorian landscape. Acker calls them stitchpunks. So while the story does take up the theme of man vs. machine, it does so from a post-human point of view:
It's not our perspective so it's creatures that are inhabiting this ruined world, but they interface with it in a completely different way than we would. It's about how they're creating new life in this environment.