Wil Wheaton’s dog died – losing a pet is horrible. I know the cynics will roll their eyes but if you’ve lived with an animal – especially a dog – it’s almost impossible not to imbue them with human characteristics. They become friends. And they’re more reliable than most humans. I can still be brought to sudden tears if the memories of my childhood dog’s (Rusty) death sneak up on me…
Wil’s post reminded me of the weirdest thing that happened over the weekend.
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…
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