Movie Review - 9 (2009)

Featuring the voice talent of Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, and John C. Reilly
Directed by Shane Acker

Let me be honest up front here. There were some work issues that occurred during the middle of this that caused my attention to be taken away from the film for a portion of the middle. The thing is, though, this thing never caught my attention from the very beginning, so I don't think it really will end up making a difference in my rating.

It's a post-apocalyptic world, all humans are dead, and the only things surviving on the planet are nine little "sock people" created by some scientist guy prior to his demise. These "sock people" live in fear of some various robot creatures that want to kill them by sucking their "souls" out of their bodes (the scientist placed bits of his soul in each of the sock creatures). That's it.

And I couldn't care less. I felt like I was watching a distant cousin of The Nightmare Before Christmas. There were scenes and characters that felt like they were pulled right out of that film. Sure, it looked a little richer and had better backgrounds (but I'd expect that from a computer-animated flick made two decades after Nightmare), but this really didn't have any emotional oomph to it. I didn't care what happened to any of these "sock puppets." Everything looked the same (and I'm not just talking about the characters). The backgrounds and "set design" were just shades of brown and gray, ultimately very unappealing to the eye even for the short running time of the movie.

Maybe this thing worked as an animated short (which it was prior to the director deciding to flesh it out to a feature), but it didn't work at all in this extended format. And, once again, there's not a single animated film that I'd long to see in the Best Animated Film category this year.

The RyMickey Rating: D+