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"3 stars"
by Lew Irwin
full review:
Wednesday is not a day of the week when studios ordinarily release new films, not unless they're bona fide blockbusters, but studio marketers at Focus Films were not about to let the date 9/9/09 go by unnoticed -- not when they had a movie titled 9 to promote. The Tim Burton-produced animated film, which opens in 1,638 theaters today is receiving mixed reviews from critics, many of which compare it to last year's Pixar smash WALL-E. Several suggest that far more imagination went into the animation than into the story. As Claudia Puig puts it in her review in USA Today: "It's too bad the thin story didn't match the stylishly haunting visuals." Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer calls it "visually imaginative, though narratively impoverished." And the Associated Press's Christy Lemire writes that "the animation is so breathtaking in its originality, so weird and wondrous in its detail, you wish there were more meat to the screenplay." In fact, several critics are willing to forgive director Shane Acker for the narrative lapse, given what they regard as the breathtaking visual quality of the film. (Surprisingly, it is one of the few animated films of the year that was not released in 3D.) The movie, writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times, "lingers in a strange, sinister and brilliantly realized landscape rich with allusions to the histories of painting, animation, fantastic literature and 20th-century totalitarianism." Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune, while finding much to criticize about the movie, nevertheless concludes: "Every year the envelope of contemporary animation is pushed, stretched and tested by all sorts of adventurous talents. Acker is one of them." And Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun writes that Acker "doesn't provide us with the riches of a born storyteller. But he just may be a born moviemaker. As a visual artist he sweeps you up in gimcrack panoramas that merge into a desolate beauty. This movie will make young-adult and older viewers alike gasp like toddlers amazed by their first pop-up book. Its imagery invades your eyes from every corner of the screen and swathes itself around your brain."
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