9 sets in a stunning post-apocalyptic world where all that’s left is deaths and destruction, well, and some tiny rag-dolls with numbers, and some deadly robotic beasts that are hunting them. The movie is incredible well-made with amazing details and style, and yet I found it too depressing to do a second viewing or recommend it to others. There are always films like that, so good and yet so depressing that you can’t even watch – Children of Men, I am looking at you! 9 is another example, and it’s even more so given it’s an animated feature with cute rag-dolls characters. It’s a movie where you shouldn’t bring kids in unless you want them to have nightmares.

Title character 9 is voiced by Elijah Wood, who is definitely channeling Frodo again at this particular journey. Certain scenes, like when he said to 5 that they must go to the factory to rescue 2, I was like, hmm, isn’t that Mount Doom and 5 is kinda like Sam? And when 9 awaken the evil robot with the big red eye – It looks like a combination of all the evil lifeless creatures from 2001 A Space Odyessy, Matrix and LOTR. I absolutely loved the character designs, each rag-doll is so detailed that it’s amazing to look at, I especially like 3 & 4 because 7 introduced them as catalogers (librarian reference~ haha) Other than that, the film is too dark (in theme) and the future too bleak that is just tough to watch. I mean in the end there’s only a dead world with these rag-dolls that definitely can’t reproduce to repopulate the earth, what’s the point? (I wasn’t giving out anything since that’s the whole setup with the film and you know as it always does that good win over evil~)

One big criticism I have that is not directed to this particular film but to the general Hollywood attitude and to a larger extend, the Western culture have on robots and machines – that they all all evil and will always rise up and turn against human. Why is it always this negative? There are countless sci-fi movies and yet good robots? you can count in one hand. I don’t understand why there is this deep psycological fear of inanimated objects and lifeforms. Luckily Japanese has a counter-balance view because of their love and respect to robots, they produced many lovable robot characters and films, but they are sadly in the minority when compared to the massive amount of Hollywood films with evil robots. It’s a bad cycle where fear feeds on fear and produce more of this fear of robots. Why can’t there be more Wall-E and Eve? R2D2 and C3P0? You got to admit even though there are tons of good robots from Japan like Astro Boy, Doraemon, Arale from Dr Slump, Gundam, none of them is popular enough with Americans to turn the tide, we need more Wall-E to change this perception of evil robots!

Related posts:

1. Astroboy
2. Avatar
3. Evolution of Zombies
4. Some upcoming Fantasy films
5. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Tagged: Movies · Robot