9

A couple days after my first visit to Studio on the Square, I was back there, this time with my friend Greg. His two sons were at his ex-wife's place and we had the evening to ourselves. We decided to make it a movie double feature evening. Our first showing of the night was going to be 9, which had just been released to amazing reviews.

At first the movie did not disappoint me at all. For one thing, the animation is very good. Furthermore the style of the animation fits into the steampunk storyline very well---apocalyptic World War II era. Somehow everything about this part of the movie felt very right.

The voices were well-cast. My usual complaints about animated features being cast with an eye to star power draw, instead of real voice talent, was not in effect. At no point did I find myself being able to see the actors sitting in the studio at the microphone, something that happens all too often (like with John Travolta in Bolt).

The story itself was very intriguing as well, and kept me following it for the first hour. The only sour note was the fleeting sinking feeling at discovering that the only female character was the obligatory ninja, kick-aass woman warrior type. We've come a long way since Elinore in Wizards, baby. Every movie now needs a female warrior to remind us that femininity is dead and is never coming back. Girls just want to kick s9me ass. Under no circumstances can a male character rescue a female character, unless there is some kind of reciprocal rescuing. We mustn't give the children the idea that such sex roles are in any way good. Let's all raise our little red books and shout "Power to the People and Down with the Capitalist Gender Identities!"

O.K. That was probably too much criticism for this movie. I got used to it.

The real disappointment about this movie was at the end, with got gooey in a faux spiritual way that reminded me of the "happy ghosts" of Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi at the end of Return of the Jedi. There was so much good hard-edged Steampunk in this movie that to see this kind of spiritualist crap in the last few minutes felt like a big letdown, so much that it nearly spoiled the entire movie. Certainly I walked out of the theater feeling much more ambiguous about it than I would have, if it had kept to a more naturalistic story.

It's the great tradeoff we have made in Postmodernity. In the land of movies, we no longer believe in God, or in the power of Christianity (which is almost never shown in a positive light), but we believe in all manner of ghosts and spirits that manifest themselves in the physical world.

But we're oh so smarter and more advanced because of it, aren't we?