The Case for 9 Luftballons

Tim Burton has a few things to his name this month: Alice in Wonderland comes out tantalisingly soon (and, in a coincidental kind of way, I just read about why the expression “mad as a hatter” came to be coined), but he also has producer credits on a short computer generated film called 9 as well.

This is not a big musical movie, though there is an incessant and, on more than one occasion, irritating score. 9 is about a gang of little sack-cloth creatures which are created by a lone scientist as the 1930s fascist Europe-inspired country crumbles under an unmerciful assault by another manmade mechanical marvel turned rogue. Together, they need to work out how to save themselves, and the world.

The whole look of the movie is wonderful, as is the design of the retro-technological marvels that populate it. The care and love that went into the imagery is apparent in every frame, and the incredible voice talents of Christopher “Von Trapp” Plummer and Martin Landau give depth to what are very externally beautiful creations.

It’s a pity that such attention was not really given to the story. To be honest, the final scenes had me scratching my head in complete confusion, wondering what on earth happened and then who brought out the very pungent cheese. As a set of action sequences, the whole thing moves along fairly nicely, but the driving force behind that is talking on his cellphone and so only occasionally paying attention to the road. Elijah Wood’s 9 and John C Reilly’s 5 are the main action heroes, though they aren’t really given a huge amount of dialogue to turn them into characters to care about, and the rest of the crew are even more neglected.

As with Avatar though, there were some who found the superficial attempts at depth highly entertaining, with one particularly vocal cinema goer in the row in front of me articulating enraptured utterances throughout most of the movie, though this only served as a counterpoint upon which to measure my own lack of appreciation.

What the film lacked in coherence though, it made up for in brevity. Besides the final cloying scene, the film moved along at a pace that kept me entertained if not necessarily understanding what was going on. It is a beautiful movie to see, but the visuals hide a fairly threadbare interior, though it must be said they do hide it very well.

Verdict: The beautiful world of 9 is amazing to see, but, much like the creatures that inhabit the world, the film lacks a certain something underneath. Not heart, as it has plenty of that, but actually more of a brain. 5 little toy people out of 9.