Every day I spend at least three hours thanking the heavens television and internet cat videos have atrophied the imaginations of a generation of our youth.
An imagination is a terrible thing. Unless you're talking about Guillermo Del Toro, "imaginative" is pretty much a synonym for "insufferable." It's usually used to describe movies that are either one long whimsical dream sequence (imagine me making an obscene crotch-based hand gesture here--unless that makes you uncomfortable, in which case Q.E.D.) or tries to pass itself off as original by posing the following question: What if King Arthur were real and also a Louisiana werewolf?
How much imagination does a work of sci-fi or fantasy really need? Get one good idea, make the sidekick a dwarf or a robot, and bam, you've got enough material for your series to fill a Gideon warehouse. As a sci-fi movie, 9 may not be perfect, but you've got to respect the way it feels so fantastically alive without ever drowning you in capricious nonsense.
War between man and machine has left the earth a silent ruin. A mechanical doll named 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) wakes in this world confused and alone. He soon meets 2, another creation like him, but within moments they're attacked by a monstrous automaton that hauls 2 away to a distant foundry.
The injured 9 is found and restored by a small team of dolls that's been hiding in the rubble and waiting for the last of the dangers to die off. Not content to wait, 9 spearheads a mission to rescue 2--and accidentally awakens a monstrous robot of terrible power.
This is the kind of thing that could easily have gotten lost in its own magical world of steam-powered fairies and talking screwdrivers, but director Shane Acker deftly avoids the temptation to wonder it up. His robots may be big-eyed assemblies of buttons and burlap, but they aren't delightfully quaint toys, they're wind-up garbage. That's because everything in his post-apocalyptic world is refuse and leftovers: if you're going to build something out of that, it's going to end up a little bit cute and a little bit dumpy.
That's the kind of internal logic that keeps your disbelief suspended. The story works the same way, busting out a couple big made-up premises and then grounding them in small and consistent details that make it feel real.
Oh right, and all those corpses and rubble lying around aren't so whimsically charming, either. Like WALL-E, 9 is beautiful in a dirty sort of way, but it's also bleak and grim without being explicit. Also: it looks totally sweet.
It's so well animated, scaled, and designed, in fact, it's easy not to notice the dialogue doesn't do much but sit there. Complicating matters, 9 and the other dolls are meant to be archetypal characters, so if what they're saying sounds generic, even a little cliched, does that mean it's actually good writing? How does that work? Can you really claim victory in being good at being bad? That's like bragging about being a feloniously crummy driver, then triumphantly plowing your F-150 through an elementary school crosswalk. Kudos on meeting your goal, but I have to question whether it was worth setting in the first place.
It's not a big deal, it's just a place where the script could have excelled but didn't. The same thing could be said about its appropriate yet vaguely unsatisfying ending. It's fine, yes, but next to that gorgeous world, kinetic action, and clever direction, 9 can't help but feel a little less than it should have been.
Grade: B