Tactile and Kinetic: 9
Jan. 16th, 2010 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetSo, I watched a ton of movies in a short time over the holidays, and it got me wondering: what is it that makes a person like a film? You can go into a movie that seems to have everything you want -the right genre, your favourite director and actors, a brilliant concpet- and come away cold. And then you can see some minor little work, something that seems like it'll turn up in dvd sales bins for 7.99 soon enough, and feel absolutely struck by it. Has that happened to you?
Well, it happened to me with 9. I think 9 is a great movie. Will it get a lot of acclaim in years to come? Does it really, objectively, deserve a lot of acclaim? I don't know: but it resonated with me, somehow. It's a mysterious thing, liking movies.
9. Dir. Shane Acker, 2009.
And now, for something completely different! This is a film with a distinctive vision. It’s based on new director Shane Acker’s short film thesis project at UCLA, so while the production values are high and it played in general release, it still has the lingering film-school feel of someone working through their interests and obsessions, rather than the feel of a committee of screenwriters and execs pitching to a broad audience. It feels…personal. I’d like to make a movie like this!
That’s not to say it’s totally avant-garde. It’s more like a combination of some of the weirder stop-motion animators –the Brothers Quay, Jan Svenkmajer- with more accessible steampunk/action sci-fi narrative conventions. The story is your basic post-apocalyptic scenario with a twist. As usual, humans have made robots too smart too fast. The robots are used for military purposes, they revolt, total war ensues. All organic life is killed off, leaving the world a barren litter of ruins and stumps under dim, poisonous clouds. So, it’s the Matrix/Animatrix “Second Renaissance” story, right? Almost. Here, there’s no hardy group of rebel humans in fetish gear to oppose the machines. The only survivors are the machines, including nine little burlap rag-doll robots about a handspan high, each designated by a number written on their body.
We follow the last doll to awaken, 9, as he meets what remains of the series and struggles with them against predatory mechanical animals. No punches pulled here: a number of the major characters die and there's some fairly intense action-violence. On a first viewing, I found it had enough structure to follow (even to make it a bit predictable), but enough detail in the worldbuilding to draw me in completely.
Where the movie is weakest, I think, is in the characterization. The dolls are well distinguished from each other: besides having a number, there are differences in their materials and character designs that give them a minimum of personality. But when it comes to those personalities, each number is less a person than an archetype: 0 the Artist (Fool), 1 the Patriarch, 2 the Sidekick, 3 the Magic Twins, 5 the Mentor, 7 the Warrior-Woman (Anima), 8 the Brute, 9 the Hero. Even 9, as the protagonist, doesn’t really develop or show any doubts: he’s just straight-forwardly brave all the way through, true to his function. The dolls didn’t speak in the original short film, which played like a pantomime, and here dialogue is purposely minimized, so that their lines tend to sound contrived and instrumental, not following the patterns of natural conversation to create rounded personalities.
Then again, this isn’t a movie about naturalism. It is a movie about contriving, tinkering, mechanical production. These things aren’t humans, and shouldn’t be. The interest falls in how they use objects to navigate the world, and in how they are objects themselves. I love their rough, textured burlap "skin" and floppy, sandbaggy bodies, combined with sharp, precise lens-scope eyes. They look like solid things you could handle. When they fall, they fall hard, and lie with a certain vulnerability. I also very much like the fact that 9’s body has a zipper down the front, that he can be painlessly opened up, rearranged, given a voice and improved –machine body, body without organs?
The world the characters move in is just as well-realized, with rich umber and black colour palettes and moody lighting design. This is what I wanted from Coraline: something darker, more dramatic, less like the brightness you usually see in cg. In fact, I think this cg movie is less cg-ish and more like stop-motion than the stop-motion Coraline. It’s not the material that does it, but the aesthetic. Or, it’s about an aesthetic of materiality. 9 is a tactile, kinetic sort of movie. You can imagine the touch of burlap just to look at it. And then there’s the spectacular handling of weight, especially in the short film, where 9 pushes a thick, heavy book on end and sways together with it as it finds its centre of balance. You can feel their parallel movements. This is what I find lacking in cg movies like Monsters vs. Aliens. A lot of mainstream cg “feels” smooth to the mind’s touch, like plastic and glass, where I want something rough, something with grip, friction. 9 has that tactile sensibility. I’ll be watching out for this Shane Acker guy!
Well, it happened to me with 9. I think 9 is a great movie. Will it get a lot of acclaim in years to come? Does it really, objectively, deserve a lot of acclaim? I don't know: but it resonated with me, somehow. It's a mysterious thing, liking movies.
9. Dir. Shane Acker, 2009.
And now, for something completely different! This is a film with a distinctive vision. It’s based on new director Shane Acker’s short film thesis project at UCLA, so while the production values are high and it played in general release, it still has the lingering film-school feel of someone working through their interests and obsessions, rather than the feel of a committee of screenwriters and execs pitching to a broad audience. It feels…personal. I’d like to make a movie like this!
That’s not to say it’s totally avant-garde. It’s more like a combination of some of the weirder stop-motion animators –the Brothers Quay, Jan Svenkmajer- with more accessible steampunk/action sci-fi narrative conventions. The story is your basic post-apocalyptic scenario with a twist. As usual, humans have made robots too smart too fast. The robots are used for military purposes, they revolt, total war ensues. All organic life is killed off, leaving the world a barren litter of ruins and stumps under dim, poisonous clouds. So, it’s the Matrix/Animatrix “Second Renaissance” story, right? Almost. Here, there’s no hardy group of rebel humans in fetish gear to oppose the machines. The only survivors are the machines, including nine little burlap rag-doll robots about a handspan high, each designated by a number written on their body.
We follow the last doll to awaken, 9, as he meets what remains of the series and struggles with them against predatory mechanical animals. No punches pulled here: a number of the major characters die and there's some fairly intense action-violence. On a first viewing, I found it had enough structure to follow (even to make it a bit predictable), but enough detail in the worldbuilding to draw me in completely.
Where the movie is weakest, I think, is in the characterization. The dolls are well distinguished from each other: besides having a number, there are differences in their materials and character designs that give them a minimum of personality. But when it comes to those personalities, each number is less a person than an archetype: 0 the Artist (Fool), 1 the Patriarch, 2 the Sidekick, 3 the Magic Twins, 5 the Mentor, 7 the Warrior-Woman (Anima), 8 the Brute, 9 the Hero. Even 9, as the protagonist, doesn’t really develop or show any doubts: he’s just straight-forwardly brave all the way through, true to his function. The dolls didn’t speak in the original short film, which played like a pantomime, and here dialogue is purposely minimized, so that their lines tend to sound contrived and instrumental, not following the patterns of natural conversation to create rounded personalities.
Then again, this isn’t a movie about naturalism. It is a movie about contriving, tinkering, mechanical production. These things aren’t humans, and shouldn’t be. The interest falls in how they use objects to navigate the world, and in how they are objects themselves. I love their rough, textured burlap "skin" and floppy, sandbaggy bodies, combined with sharp, precise lens-scope eyes. They look like solid things you could handle. When they fall, they fall hard, and lie with a certain vulnerability. I also very much like the fact that 9’s body has a zipper down the front, that he can be painlessly opened up, rearranged, given a voice and improved –machine body, body without organs?
The world the characters move in is just as well-realized, with rich umber and black colour palettes and moody lighting design. This is what I wanted from Coraline: something darker, more dramatic, less like the brightness you usually see in cg. In fact, I think this cg movie is less cg-ish and more like stop-motion than the stop-motion Coraline. It’s not the material that does it, but the aesthetic. Or, it’s about an aesthetic of materiality. 9 is a tactile, kinetic sort of movie. You can imagine the touch of burlap just to look at it. And then there’s the spectacular handling of weight, especially in the short film, where 9 pushes a thick, heavy book on end and sways together with it as it finds its centre of balance. You can feel their parallel movements. This is what I find lacking in cg movies like Monsters vs. Aliens. A lot of mainstream cg “feels” smooth to the mind’s touch, like plastic and glass, where I want something rough, something with grip, friction. 9 has that tactile sensibility. I’ll be watching out for this Shane Acker guy!
