This looks really good.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/9/
I hadn’t seen or heard a word about it until my brother-in-law brought it to my attention.
I saw the preview when we picked up Coraline for our kids, and I thought it looked rather interesting. I’ve yet to see any previews anywhere else, but I’m curious to find out more about it.
Those machines are right out of HL Episode two, but agree looks cool.
9 predates Episode 2.
Saw a preview for this before GI Joe. Looked like a videogame cutscene to me.
It’s a dystopian sci-fi/fantasy movie in CG, so…uh…yeah?
More so than GI Joe itself?
Im interested to see how this does. But its worth noting that although Tim Burton’s name is stamped all over this, he is just producing. Shane Acker is the writer and director. As far as I can tell Acker is relatively new and being given a pretty big budget to work with for his first movie. Its a cool opportunity to sink or swim, I hope it works out.
His only previous creation is this short from animation school: http://video.titantv.com/v/Mr-Grenade/000B00JX.aspx
Umm, it’s an evolution of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IQcMeNh7Hc
So he’s done a bit more than Mr. Grenade.
This looks pretty cool, has a lot of good voice talent in it, and is something I could see with my kids. I think it just vaulted to the top of my movie list.
The original short worked so well because it didn’t have any characters talking, and this seems to be a worrying reversal of that.
Saw the trailer for this before Inglourious Basterds. Enjoyed it far more than the Tarantino movie. Can’t wait to see it.
I saw a preview screening of ‘9’ tonight. Non-spoilers: I thought it was just okay overall. The editing was not well done; there were a couple of points where I was thinking to myself that I must have missed something, but I think there were just scenes missing (it’s only 79 minutes long, so perhaps a lot was cut?). While the look of the film (dark, destroyed environment) fit with plot, of course, it didn’t have any wow moments with the setting that I could take away as being particularly memorable. The voice acting was perfectly fine but it didn’t bring anything to the film (I probably would have preferred the entire film silent more so than voiced).
What makes an interesting film like this fall a bit flat beyond anything I’ve mentioned above, though, is having an ending that felt like it didn’t belong to the same movie. Oh, I came up with some plausible explanations for it…but I shouldn’t have to. Meh.
I wouldn’t recommend it for theatre. Perhaps as a rental. I was definitely let down by the overall experience. It would have benefited with the addition of about 30 minutes to give the characters a bit more life and personality and to see more of their world.
Saw the trailer before Inglourious Basterds today. All I can think is that the people who made it must have been pretty pissed when LittleBigPlanet came out.
I think I’m with Ebert on this one. There are some spectacular visuals throughout this movie, worth seeing for that alone. But I wish there were something else to it.
Should have been in 3D.
I would give the visuals and style of the film and “A” … I would give the plot, especially the ending, an “F”. So disappointed.
No spoilers:
Jason has it about right. Visually the movie is pretty amazing, both in terms of art design and animation. It’s a setting and a plot setup that is, at least in my experience, completely original and quite imaginative. It has a cool blend of dystopian sci-fi and spiritualism that will probably appeal to people who liked the first season or two of Lost and other mystical-science things like that. For those reasons alone, I enjoyed the movie a lot. Definitely see it in a theater.
The story, though, had some real issues. It ticks along fine for about the first half or 3/4, and then it really seems like the writer either didn’t know where he was going and took a big left turn out of nowhere, or else did a terrible job communicating what was supposed to be going on in the earlier parts of the film. The characters are also pretty generic: the good-hearted and inquisitive hero, the aging leader who places too much emphasis on safety and conservativism, the dumb brute henchman, the plucky rebel, the loopy-but-accurate prophet that nobody listens to until the very end, etc.
Overall, I feel about it much the same way I felt about the last movie I saw, Ponyo: it’s worth seeing for the visuals and the creative ideas, despite a main story that isn’t very satisfying. Go see it in a theater.
Just saw this today. BEAUTIFUL film, and well worth seeing on the big screen. Perhaps the best CGI I’ve ever seen as far as never seeing anything that made me think “that’s CG.” (Except the humans, but that’s fine, as the uncanny valley is a creepy place.)
I was a bit let down by the ending too, but overall I did enjoy the film despite that.
[slightly spoileriffic, but just barely:]
Rywill, as for the characters being generic, each character was an aspect of the creator’s personality: The conservative, cowardly character, the hero, the left and right brain twins, the crazed creativity, etc.
[SPOILERYTOWN]
Okay, SERIOUSLY, what does the end of the film mean? There are all of, what, 4 ragdolls still alive, with the machines’ gas having wiped out all other life, according to The Exposition. They talk about getting on with their lives. . . involving. . . being immortal ragdolls with exactly three potential friends each (and two of those four are mute projectors/encyclopedias)?
And then the spirits of their dead buddies float into the sky (are they the Source? Are they going back to the Source now? What the fuck was Six EVER talking about?) and it rains. . . and the rain drops contain. . . fragments of the spirits? Automagically generated protozoa that will. . . immediately die on the barren world? Boogers?
I mean. . . okay. What was the doctor’s plan when he split his personality into nine ragdolls? What was the little button supposed to do? Were they all supposed to get sucked into The Machine? Were none of them supposed to? Was the button ever supposed to be attached to The Machine? And after they defeated The Machine (somehow), what does pressing the buttons do? Were those five supposed to die? What the fuck is happening?
[DE-SPOILERYTOWN]
And I am so frustrated by my inability to understand what the fuck any of that means precisely because I was having a really good time riding along with the flick up till then. Okay, sure maybe everyone in the movie was a bit flat, but the whole techno-wizardry, post-apocalyptic steampunk puppets, haha evil scientist/commie empire, easy-to-follow Quest to Save World vibe was fine by me. I can sink my teeth into that, especially when it’s so damned pretty, and enjoy myself.
But either I am seriously overthinking the end of the movie, am an absolute idiot and missing some obvious stuff, or it doesn’t make a lick of sense from the moment that Six starts muttering about the Source.
Dammitall, before I started to think about it, I was convinced that I REALLY liked this movie.