I took my little sister and her friends to see the premiere on Wednesday. I had only seen a couple previews for the movie and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. 9 throws you right into the storyline, like so many Twilight Zone episodes. You don’t know where you are or when you are, what’s happened, or why these little puppet people are the only ones around. And I think this works, on the whole. It’s almost a relief to have a movie that doesn’t try to explain itself to death in the first ten minutes.

The animation is really wonderful. At a time when there are so many animated movies to be seen, and so many of them beautifully made, I was still caught off-guard by the level of detail. The puppets look and sound real, their environment feels real, and for that reason I was glad that this particular animated feature wasn’t a 3-D release. I think it would have intruded upon the connection between the viewer and the place, and more likely would have trivialized the story.

Because, if the PG-13 rating didn’t clue you in, this is definitely not a movie for kids. In fact, the IMDB movie page calls it a “post-apocalyptic nightmare”. While I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, the fact is that death is ever-present in the film. Not in any overdone way (there’s no blood or gore), but in the way that simply reminds the viewer that this is reality: people die.

As with most post-apocalyptic films, there is the obligatory warning to the human viewer about the dangers of ‘the machine’ (i.e. artificially intelligent weapons of war). But the message is never heavy-handed. There is spirituality in the film, but it never feels too contrived or overstated. The overall effect of 9 is wonder: as these new creations are discovering this world and trying to understand it, so are we.