Preview
If you enjoy bleak gray dirt, rusty junk, and burlap potato sacks running around in fear for seventy-nine straight minutes, Hollywood has cooked up something special for you. Directed by Shane Acker and slapped with Tim Burton’s name on the posters so people might actually buy a ticket, the 2009 animated oddity “9” takes audiences into an apocalyptic wasteland where humanity was completely wiped out by its own mechanical toys. Now, only nine little stitch-and-zipper ragdoll puppets remain to wander the scorched ruins.
Expanding on Acker’s Oscar-nominated 2005 student short film, the full-length feature promises a visually staggering, steampunk-fueled nightmare packed with terrifying mechanical beasts, razor blades, and existential dread. Audiences looking for singing snowmen or talking cartoon squirrels will need to look elsewhere, because this grim PG-13 survival story is aimed squarely at older crowds who appreciate gothic atmosphere and bleak mechanical destruction.
Review by Ben Dover
I sat down on my recliner, clicked on my streaming app, and pulled up this movie called “9.” That is the whole title. Just the single digit 9. Back in my day, people took the time to name a picture something with a little grit, like The Dirty Dozen or High Noon. Now we get single digits. The movie came out in theaters on September 9, 2009, which means some hotshot marketing kid got paid half a million bucks just to match the calendar date to the poster. My back hurts just thinking about the boardroom meeting where everybody clapped for that nonsense.
The story is about a bunch of little burlap ragdolls called stitchpunks running around a bombed-out city that looks like my garage after my brother-in-law borrowed my socket set. Apparently mankind built a gigantic thinking machine to solve all their problems, and big surprise, the machine decided humans were annoying and gassed everyone into oblivion. You kids today are glued to your smart screens and talking to computer gadgets in your kitchens, so you might want to pay attention. You think your fancy robotic vacuum cleaner loves you? Give it two years and a couple wheels of steel and it will be hunting you down in the hallway like these metal crabs in the movie.
The main doll is voiced by Elijah Wood, who plays the newly awakened number 9. The kid wakes up in a dusty lab, finds a bunch of older dolls hiding out in a ruined cathedral, and immediately ignores the elder doll in charge to poke his nose into places it does not belong. Number 1, voiced by Christopher Plummer, is an old grump in a pope hat who just wants everyone to stay hidden, keep their mouths shut, and survive. Naturally, the movie paints him as a cowardly jerk. Let me tell you something: Number 1 was entirely right. The moment 9 shows up, he starts pushing strange glowing junk into ancient outlets and wakes up the mother of all killer robot contraptions. If 9 had just sat down on a church pew and kept his hands to himself, half his buddies wouldn’t have had their souls vacuumed out of their eyeballs.
What drives me nuts about modern filmmakers is that they think pretty junk moving fast can replace actual heart. The movie looks terrific if you enjoy brown mud, green smoke, and twisted sheet metal, but these puppets don’t have enough personality to fill a shot glass. You barely learn their names, which is just as well because their names are literally numbers. “Oh no, look out, 2 got grabbed! 5 is crying! 7 did a backflip!” I felt like I was watching someone call out bingo numbers at the Elks Lodge while an angry vacuum cleaner terrorized the buffet table. It is eighty minutes long, which is a blessing because my attention span for talking pincushions ends around the one-hour mark.
Still, credit where it is due: the mechanical monsters are actually pretty terrifying. There is this snake thing with a porcelain baby doll face and sewing needles for hands called the Seamstress that made me double-check the locks on my back door. It is original, it doesn’t insult you with goofy pop songs, and it doesn’t waste time on potty jokes. It is just too sour and thin on story to be a real classic. If you like dark cartoons and feeling mildly depressed while staring at rusty gears, go right ahead and stream it.
Cast and Characters
- Elijah Wood (9): The new kid on the block who wakes up without a voice box, finds a brass zipper, and decides he needs to lead everybody on a suicide mission. Wood does his usual wide-eyed, breathless hero routine, sounding like he just jogged up a flight of stairs.
- John C. Reilly (5): A sweet, one-eyed doll who acts as the loyal mechanic and assistant. He is the only character who feels like a regular guy you wouldn’t mind having a beer with, which means bad things are guaranteed to happen to him.
- Christopher Plummer (1): The self-appointed ruler of the group wearing velvet robes and a tin-can crown. Plummer brings old-school theatrical gravitas to a burlap sack, barking orders and acting like every sensible retired person dealing with reckless kids.
- Jennifer Connelly (7): The badass rebel warrior of the group who wears a bird skull on her head and leaps off roofs with two daggers. Connelly gives her enough grit to convince you this tiny doll could split a mechanical cat in half.
- Martin Landau (2): The frail old inventor who wanders out into the wasteland with a candle strapped to his noggin and immediately gets captured. Landau gives him a warm, fragile grandfather energy that makes you mad when he gets into trouble.
- Crispin Glover (6): The resident artist who sits in the corner obsessively drawing the same round key symbol with ink-stained pen nibs for fingers. He sounds totally nuts, which means Glover didn’t have to do much acting at all.
- Fred Tatasciore (8): The giant muscle-headed bodyguard doll with a giant cleaver who eats magnetic junk for fun. Tatasciore just grunts, flexes, and acts like every bouncer who ever kicked my buddies out of a bowling alley lounge.
Special Effects and Animation
Shane Acker built this world with an incredible eye for junk-drawer realism. The textures on the burlap, the loose threads, the brass grommets, and the oily gears look tangible enough that you can almost smell the rust and motor oil. The mechanical monsters look like someone took old farm equipment, sewing kits, and surgical knives and turned them into walking nightmares. The action scenes move fast without turning into a digital blur, and the lighting in the decaying city ruins looks great. It is top-shelf animation that avoids looking like plastic toys.
Music and Score
Deborah Lurie handled the primary orchestral score, with Danny Elfman pitching in for the main themes. It does the job with heavy brass, gothic strings, and pounding metallic percussion that matches all the stomping war machines. The real musical highlight of the whole film is an old scratchy 78-RPM phonograph record playing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” right in the middle of a bombed-out room. That one scene has more genuine atmosphere than half the dialogue in the rest of the flick.
Ben Dover’s Rating
3 out of 5 Stars
9 is a cozy family picture for anyone who thinks their room is just missing rusty scrap metal and nightmare puppets. It is visually impressive and wonderfully dark, but the characters have about as much emotional depth as an actual burlap bag. Worth a watch for the monster designs and short runtime, but don’t expect to care when the stuffing starts flying.
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
In an alternate post-apocalyptic world, humanity was wiped out in a massive war between mankind and the Fabrication Machine, an artificially intelligent behemoth built to manufacture industrial tools that was corrupted by a tyrannical dictator for military conquest. When the machine rebelled, its toxic gas and mechanical monstrosities exterminated every human being on the planet. In his dying days, the brilliant Scientist who created the machine used an ancient alchemical talisman to infuse pieces of his own soul into nine small, hand-crafted homunculi made of fabric and scrap parts.
The story begins as doll 9 wakes up on the Scientist’s laboratory workbench in the ruined city. Taking the mysterious talisman with him, 9 ventures outside and meets 2, an elderly tinkerer who crafts him a speaking device. Moments later, the pair are ambushed by the Cat Beast, a stalking quadruped robot made of bones and iron. The beast grabs 2 along with the talisman and drags him across the ruins. Collapsing from exhaustion, 9 is rescued by 5, a timid, one-eyed mechanic, who takes him to a grand ruined cathedral where the remaining survivors live.
At the sanctuary, 9 meets 1, the pompous elder who demands strict isolation to preserve what little life remains, guarded by his hulking brute enforcer, 8. 9 also encounters 6, an unhinged visionary doll whose fingers are pen nibs, constantly drawing the circular pattern from the talisman. Despite 1’s strict orders to hide, 9 convinces 5 to accompany him on a rescue mission to the factory ruins to save 2.
At the factory, the two discover 2 held captive in a cage. Before they can escape, the Cat Beast attacks again. Just as the beast corners them, 7, a nimble warrior doll wearing a skull helmet, arrives and slays the creature. Curious about a socket matching the talisman on a massive dormant apparatus, 9 inserts the device. The talisman immediately activates the slumbering Fabrication Machine. The awakened monster grabs 2 and absorbs his soul through the talisman, killing him instantly while 9, 5, and 7 barely escape.
The surviving dolls regroup at a derelict library where twin mute archivists, 3 and 4, reside. Using old film reels and documents, the twins reveal the history of the war, the Scientist, and the dictator. Meanwhile, the Fabrication Machine constructs a flying predator called the Winged Beast to hunt down the dolls. The beast attacks the cathedral, sparking a brutal fight that ends when 7 and 9 manage to bring down a chandelier, decapitating the mechanical bird.
Undeterred, the Fabrication Machine uses 2’s dead body to build the Seamstress, a terrifying serpent-like robot with a porcelain doll mask and sewing needles. The Seamstress infiltrates the sanctuary, hypnotic and stealthy, and captures both 8 and 7, hauling them back to the factory. The remaining dolls mount a desperate offensive. 9 sneaks inside to free 7, but 8’s soul is consumed by the machine before they can rescue him. To kill the machine, the dolls roll an oil barrel into the factory and detonate it, engulfing the entire facility in a roaring fireball.
Believing the monster destroyed, the dolls celebrate, but the scorched machine rises from the burning rubble and attacks. In the ensuing retreat across a rickety bridge, 5 sacrifices himself to buy the others time, and his soul is drained. 6 is subsequently caught and consumed, but before dying, he cryptically tells 9 to return to “the source” and study the drawings. Realizing the machine is linked to their creation, 9 races back to the Scientist’s workshop. There, he uncovers a holographic message left behind by the Scientist, explaining that the nine dolls hold fragments of his own human soul and that the talisman is the only tool capable of extracting those souls back from the machine.
Armed with the truth, 9 returns to the battlefield where the machine has trapped 1 and 7. Number 1 redeems himself by willingly sacrificing his life to distract the machine, allowing 9 to leap onto the monster’s core, retrieve the talisman, and reverse its power. The talisman drains the stolen souls out of the machine, overloading the metal beast and destroying it once and for all.
In the aftermath, the four surviving dolls—9, 7, 3, and 4—gather to mourn their fallen comrades. 9 activates the talisman to release the souls of 1, 2, 5, 6, and 8 into the sky. The five glowing lights ascend into the atmosphere, causing rain to fall upon the barren earth. As water drops splash onto the ground, tiny glowing micro-organisms appear inside the puddles, revealing that life has finally returned to the world.
5 Famous Quotes
- 1: “Why should I risk us for them? They are fools, stirring up things best left undisturbed!”
- 2: “We are not alone. There are others… you must find them.”
- 6: “Go back… back to the source. The source! It holds the answer!”
- 9: “We woke it up. It’s our job to put an end to it.”
- The Scientist: “Our world is ending, but life must go on. I have poured our essence into you.”
5 Interesting Movie Notes
- Born as a Student Project: The feature film originated as an eleven-minute, dialogue-free computer-animated short created by Shane Acker over four and a half years while studying at the UCLA Animation Workshop. The short was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
- Tim Burton’s Involvement: Director Tim Burton discovered the original short film at an awards screening and was so taken by the visual world that he teamed up with Russian action director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) to help finance and produce the feature-length adaptation.
- Voice Overhaul: While the original short had zero spoken dialogue and relied entirely on pantomime and sound effects, the studio insisted on hiring high-profile Hollywood voice talent, including Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly, to make the complex post-apocalyptic narrative easier for general audiences to follow.
- Pamela Pettler’s Script: The screenplay was written by Pamela Pettler, who had previously demonstrated a knack for spooky stop-motion writing with Burton’s Corpse Bride and Sony’s Monster House.
- Heavy Metal Steampunk Terminology: Shane Acker coined the term “stitchpunk” specifically to describe the unique visual aesthetic of the characters, distinguishing their cloth, needles, and zipper construction from traditional Victorian brass-and-leather steampunk.
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