Shane Acker’s 2005 short film 9 is an exceptionally rare beast. It has beautiful visuals but it isn’t content to assume that the viewer will be content with eye-candy and so it creates a complex world and a touching story and effective characters to make you really care about what happens. And it does all this in less than eleven minutes without a line of dialogue and with excellent action sequences.

 

It is top quality science fiction movie-making.

 

The stitch-toy aesthetic of the main characters was extraordinary – and I assume whoever made Sony’s Little Big Planet was similarly impressed because if Sackboy wasn’t inspired by Acker’s visuals then god really does move in mysterious ways – but the really clever thing about 9 is the way it places this cute characters into a post-apocalyptic salvage-punk world of horrors and to tell a tight, coherent story with wonderful economy.

 

See for yourself on YouTube:

 

 

Anyway, to say that I loved 9 when I first saw it would be an understatement and I’ve wondered since whatever became of the clever director who’d made that film and what he’d do next. I presumed, like most talented film students he’d ended up making irritating commercials for big corporations.

 

So I actually did a little jig of delight when I opened this week’s Screen International to find a review of … 9… a new full length feature by Shane Acker distributed by Focus Features and produced by Time Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (amongst others).

 

There’s a Holywood-ish trailer (http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2476081689/) – with a little bit of a voice-over man vibe going on at the start – but that’s not enough to dampen my enthusiasm, because the look and feel of the original seems to have survived the transfer from short to full-length feature, even if the characters now have voices.

 

9 opens across most of the world in early September but the UK won’t see it until 30 October – which just isn’t fair. Still, I’ll be in the queue…