“9”

Focus Features

Directed by Shane Acker

Starring Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Crispin Glover and Martin Landau

Rated PG-13

2 1/2 Stars       

If you’re a grown up video gamer who enjoys “Little Big Planet” but would rather run your Sack Boy characters through more mature levels, you’ll get a kick out of “9,” an artistically impressive but ultimately pointless animated adventure.

Based on his Academy Award nominated short film, director Shane Acker gets an opportunity to expand his mini-movie into a full-fledged feature film. The story follows a little burlap rag doll named 9, voiced by Elijah Wood, is who is born into a post-apocalyptic world where humanity and machines have fought each other to extinction. As he explores the post-war rubble, 9 finds that he is not alone. There are eight other rag dolls running around, as well as a couple of left-over machines programmed to hunt and destroy the dolls.

Which means that the movie quickly turns into a series of action scenes where giant mechanical beasts hunt down the little rag dolls. It’s actually pretty exciting stuff, but very repetitive and ultimately pointless. First they fight a cat-robot, then a vulture-machine attacks, and finally a big-boss battle against a giant, one-eyed spider-bot. So what? There’s not enough time spent on characters to make you care about the rag doll’s plight, and there’s no reason to root for the little guys other than a charitable wish for their survival.

On the other hand, “9’s” animation provides plenty of reasons to cheer. The dystopian landscapes provide unique battlegrounds, and I suppose that our nine heroes (known as stitchpunkers) are cute enough, but it’s the villainous robots that really make an impression — like a two-scared-toddlers-had-to-be-taken-out-of-the-theater-level impression. The creations are a nightmarish mix of producer Tim Burton’s fevered imagination and the disturbing animation of Czech surrealist, Jan Svankmajer (wow, there’s a film school fact I never thought that I would use).

Visually, “9” is top-notch, one of the more inventive films of the year. Story-wise, it falls flat, so let’s give “9” a 9 for it’s animation, but only a 4 for the rest.