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Wednesday, September 9
Director Shane Acker's 2005 Academy Award-nominated, 11-minute short 9 was lengthened 70 or so minutes and hits the big screen today. Here's a sampling of some early critic reviews:
"It's a perfectly functional, fairly scary kids' film, with plenty of craft and creativity to keep adults occupied. But with a story as sophisticated as its visuals, it could have been much more."
— Tasha Robinson, Onion AV Club
"9 (which is a tad intense for very young kids) may not be an instant classic like Wall-E, but it signals the arrival of Shane Acker as an audacious new talent to watch."
— Lou Lumenick, New York Post
"This is a flawed gem. The script is bland with an amateur political message tacked onto it, but 9 is still something to marvel at."
— Natasha Vargas-Cooper, E! Online
"In its first half, 9 pulls you in with the promise of discovery and the thrill of action but its endgame becomes muddier as it trudges along. Projected by the data-collecting 3 and 4, we find out that the machines were once good but corrupted by man's fear of the unknown. 9's crafty concept feels similarly warped by a need for catharsis, worn structure, and mindless intimations towards the beyond."
— Chris Cabin, filmcritic.com
Posted 9/9/2009 by reelz
Related: 9 | Shane Acker
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Mixing the animated world of 9 with footage of himself in a theater, Elijah Wood has the soul sucked right out of him by one of the many mechanical menaces that litter the movie's landscape. As the title character 9, his main virtue as well as his main flaw is inquisitiveness.
Here he tinkers with the wrong machine, and in response it reaches right through the screen to makes Wood pay for his stitch-punk alter ego's transgression. As 1 tells 9 elsewhere in the movie, "Sometimes fear is the appropriate response."
Posted 9/9/2009 by Bill
Related: Elijah Wood | 9
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Saturday, September 5
Actor Elijah Wood is the rare example of a child actor who's made the transition into adulthood relatively unscathed by the ravages of Hollywood. After a part in Back to the Future Part II at the tender young age of eight, Wood went on to star in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, forever becoming identified with Hobbits. Wood is still questioned about the role, even more so now that production on Guillermo del Toro's LOTR prequel, The Hobbit, is underway.
In a recent interview to promote his new movie, 9, Wood was asked who he thinks would make a great choice to play Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.
That's a tough one. I think Ian Holm really set a high bar for that performance. He really did an extraordinary job, and he really made it his own. There's a lot of quirkiness to that character. It's not the easiest character to play. One couldn't really do it straightforward — there's some odd quirks to him. So it'll be interesting to see who they get. Nobody really comes to mind. They've mentioned a few people so far. James McAvoy is great. I think he could be interesting.
Wood is no stranger to voice acting, having lent his pipes to Mumble in the smash animated feature Happy Feet, so he was right at home in the sound booth for 9, in which he plays the lead role of #9. Interestingly, there are superficial similarities between 9 and The Lord of the Rings that have not escaped Wood's notice.
I just loved that world that [director Shane Acker] created, and I loved the idea of being a part of it and then ultimately the idea of being a part of something that would flesh that out. Taking into consideration the journey that they all took, certainly there were similarities [between 9 and LOTR], but I definitely liked the characters and I think the character of 9 was interesting. They've already established a community, and he comes in with all these questions about who they are and what they are and that we need to get to the bottom of what these machines are about and what does this talisman do. They've all stopped asking those questions. I really liked that about him — that he shakes them loose a little bit to get at who they are and get at solving the dangers that face them.
Of course, one would naturally assume that Wood's favorite role would be portraying the Hobbit that made him a mega-star, but Wood admits to favoring the dark character of Kevin from Frank Miller's Sin City.
Sin City was a pretty awesome role to play. Getting a chance to play a character like [Kevin], and also being a fan of the graphic novel, it was a real treat — not something that comes around often. So that's definitely one of my favorites.
9 also features the voice talents of Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, and Jennifer Connelly.
Next Showing: 9 opens September 9
Posted 9/5/2009 by BrentJS
Related: Sin City | Elijah Wood | The Hobbit | 9 | Shane Acker
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Friday, September 4
In terms of eye candy, it's hard to think of a movie this fall that frame-by-frame is likely to deliver as rich and exotic a visual landscape as Shane Acker's 9. More evidence of this is in our gallery of new stills, including a couple of shots of the Cat Beast that was featured in a clip linked earlier today. It's a machine, but one made more alien, and menacing (and weirdly Victorian) by incorporating the skull of a cat into its design.
No doubt it was the potential for imagery like this that got Tim Burton signed on as producer in the first place.
Posted 9/4/2009 by Bill
Related: Tim Burton | 9 | Shane Acker
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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.
Posted 9/4/2009 by Bill
Related: Elijah Wood | 9
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Monday, August 31
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.
Posted 8/31/2009 by Bill
Related: 9 | Shane Acker
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Wednesday, August 19
There's a lot of getting into trouble and getting rescued in Shane Acker and Tim Burton's animated post-apocalyptic movie 9. As the band of "stitch punks" explore their landscape, they stumble across all sorts of menacing quasi-mechanical threats to their existence and survive by working together as a group.
Yet, as we see in this new clip from the movie, they have an advantage — some of the nasty critters they're fighting really can't see all that well.
Posted 8/19/2009 by Bill
Related: Tim Burton | 9 | Shane Acker
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Friday, July 10
Although a lot of the recent promotions for Shane Acker's 9 have focused on fleshing out the other numbers of its post-apocalyptic stitch-punk gang, the just-released international trailer puts rag doll number 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) front and center. He is singled out by the scientist who created him with the task of protecting mankind's legacy, now that humans themselves are gone. It's a task made all the more daunting by the far more immediate imperative of simply not falling prey to the host of deadly mechanical beasties that also populate their world.
Posted 7/10/2009 by Bill
Related: Tim Burton | Elijah Wood | 9 | Shane Acker
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Thursday, June 25
Although rag doll number 9 is the hero of Shane Acker's 9, it is not a super-hero movie. Group cooperation is critical to survival in this post-human world populated by all sorts of nasty mechanical foes. From the recently released footage of their fight with the winged creature, it was pretty clear that no one individual would last very long in isolation. Now the other stitch-punks, as Acker calls them, are starting to get promotional posters of their own, showcasing more of the movie's amazing atmospheric art work.
The tough but somewhat dim bodyguard 8 is pictured wielding a scissor blade and a butcher knife, with the caption "to guard us." And 7, a brave female warrior, is featured crouching low with some wicked looking blade, her face concealed by a weird helmet she sculpted out of the skull of a dead bird.
Posted 6/25/2009 by Bill
Related: 9 | Shane Acker
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Monday, June 22
In a new extended clip from Shane Acker's animated post-apocalyptic tale 9, a philosophical disagreement over how to confront the many dangers of this world quickly turns urgent, as the movie's rag doll heroes try to fend off an attack from above. Pursuing them this time is a pterodactyl-like machine made of knives and sharp points. The clip offers up some fast-paced action, but along the way we also get cool panoramic views of the post-human landscape still littered with the broken architecture and detritus of its former occupants.
Posted 6/22/2009 by Bill
Related: 9 | Shane Acker