Five, Six, Seven, Eight!

Shane Acker's 9 has been given very middle of the road reviews since it's US release in September, mainly that the animation is great, no question, but the story and dialogue is cliched and contrived. Given that the main pulling power is that under producoral capacities are Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton.

9, which resembles a dark version of LittleBigPlanet the movie, is about 9 sacks with skeletal metal given life by a professor as humanity is wiped out by machines the professor invented with AI, that slowly became hostile to humanity. The 9 slowly appear as #9 awakens and is born into the wastelands of the Earth. 2, Martin Landau, is a smart old man who is abused by number 1, Christopher Plummer as a cult head leader. 5 is a partial medic, sweet-natured man, played by the epic John C. Reilly, 7 is femme fatale, even though they have no genders, played by the faceless, bland Jennifer Connelly, 6 is an introverted psychotic drawing images of an odd shape that 9 awakens to find, played by Crispin Glover. The cast is topped off by 9, Elijah Wood, as an innocent but brave and foolish kid in the world, new to everything, for better and most definitely worse.

The film most definitely looks astonishing at times and is stylistically amazing, but to be fair, whilst the script and story are simple and been done before, it's not to say that it fails on these accounts, quite the contrary, the cast give life to the characters, vibrancy in dialogue, even contrived dialogue, and the story can be tense and exciting, not knowing when it will end as well, it's a cracking little underrated gem that whilst imperfect, like the film's lead, is also a great film and deserves a lot more attention than it received on release, a must see especially next to more kiddie attempts at animation, it's a solid PG-13 action adventure, scary, dark and brilliant, and because it's not perfect I get to give it a...

9/10