At 11 minutes, ‘9’ is just as good

I’d just discovered StumbledUpon a year or so ago – maybe it was longer, I can’t remember – when one night, flitting from one Web site to the next, I found Shane Acker’s short film “9.”

It was barely 11 minutes long, but it was a quality production. And it made you wonder what Acker could do with an actual budget and all the EFX equipment that good money could buy.

Well, we no longer have to wonder. Acker’s full-length version of his film, not quite 80 minutes long, opened on Friday. And it’s the same story, sort of, just telescoped far beyond its original concept.

The story involves a little rag doll kind of creature, one who awakens one day in a burned-out world with no idea of who he is and why he exists. He can’t even speak. And when he does find someone else, and in the process discovers that he wears a No. 9 on his own back, he is thrown into a desperate struggle to survive.

Pretty soon he (voiced by Elijah Wood) and a bunch of similar kinds of numbered characters (voices provided by the likes of John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Christopher Plummer and Jennifer Connelly) are fighting mechanical monsters that seem, for no reason, to want them dead.

And it falls to 9 to both to find out why and discover how to survive.

As a film, “9” owes a lot of other films. Its story has bits and pieces of “Terminator,” “The Matrix” and “Alien” running through it. And its animated look, much of it anyway, harkens back to “The Animatrix” – or at least to Andy Jones’ installment “Final Flight of the Osiris.”

It also, overall, feels a bit thin. The creatures are charming, though we don’t get to know them very well; the plot goes in a fairly straight line and gives up little that is unexpected; and the ending sets things up perfectly for a sequel.

As a feature film, “9” is worth seeing, if you have limited expectations. Really, though, you won’t see anything that is much better than Acker’s original short … which you can see by clicking on the imbed below.