Jaideep Sen poses nine questions to animator-director Shane Acker, whose film 9, with nine characters, releases on 09/09/09. No, they didn’t chat at 9.09am.
In 2005, when director Tim Burton came across an animated short film named 9, he went on record to say that he was blown away by animator-director Shane Acker’s work. When filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov was shown the same film, he reacted in much the same way. Both expressed an interest in turning the Oscar-nominated work into a full-length film, leading Acker back to the drawing board. In its feature-length avatar, 9 is an action fantasy story, set in a post-apocalyptic world where nine survivors, with numbers for names, fight machines to save the planet.
1 What was it like to adapt your short film into a full-length feature?
The challenge was to develop the story. The film is all about waking up in a world filled with these characters, and you start to learn about the world, and how they come through in their journey. The film also led to the possibility of seeing seven more of the creatures. In the short, we only spent time with two of them, 9 and 5, and we got the chance to see the characters with their personalities.
2 The US version is rated PG-13. Why did the scenes of post-apocalyptic horror take precedence over getting in more kids into the theatres?
There’s nothing in this film that gives it the PG13 flag. There’s no nudity, no swearing, no blood at all. There are some scary images and some violence but it’s all toys on toys. I think we got rated a little harder because this medium is seen as one for children. Though in some countries it’s not, like in Japan, where it’s an adult medium.
3 Why the fascination with animated films in post-apocalyptic settings?
I think my film is different from most post-apocalyptic films in that we didn’t talk about an apocalypse. We’re gone. This is a post-human tale. We screwed and ruined our own world and all the treasures in it. In that sense, the film becomes a sort of lesson, because there’s a tragic backdrop to the story. The characters, though they’re not human in an organic sense, represent all the positive traits of humanity. They’re given a choice in terms of what can they carry on and how they can learn from our [human] mistakes. The story, for me, is a meditation on what it is to be human, and what that means in a technological world. I thought about the world after it’s gone, and the life forms that would exist after, and the story was an interesting way to explore those ideas.
4 What’s the strategy behind the release date? We thought only Indians were superstitious.
In a lot of cultures, the number nine is really powerful, there’s something magical about it. In any case, we aren’t forcing our interpretations on anybody. They open to arrive at their own conclusions. I wish I could tell you that it was some kind of master plan, or stroke of genius, that we were able to get a 09/09/09 release. The fact is that we were supposed to come out in 2008, but we had some early struggles, and we had to push the schedule into 2009. That’s when the studio [Focus Features] picked the release date, which is great. I love it.
5 Tell us about working with Burton and Bekmambetov.
The two of them were a good part of the reason the film got made. Both Tim and Timur came on the project in the very beginning. We knew we wanted to do something in the animation medium that hasn’t really been done before, and in order to do that, we wanted to get really strong directors who have vision. Tim has made a name for himself with cutting-edge films, especially pushing the envelope of stop-motion animation. Timur has made some amazing films with extremely modest budgets and we leaned on him heavily to help us figure out how we could do something at a modest budget compared to other animated films.
6 Why is everyone calling your style “stitchpunk”? What does it mean?
I think a blogger coined the phrase. Some-how, it sticks because the world that we’re exploring is not our world, it’s an off-hand reality. It’s very steampunk [a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction of the 1980s and early ’90s] in some sense.
Our film is not in the steampunk world, but in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic one and these creatures are all coming out of the bits and pieces that are left over from our civilisation. They’re like scraps, stitched together. The phrase fits the film’s style in a lot of ways. It’s stitchpunk, it’s destroyed steampunk, and the bits and pieces come together to give form to a new life.
7 Why have you always preferred working with naturalistic stop-motion techniques?
When I was in animation school [School of Arts and Architecture, University of California, Los Angeles], I studied a lot of films by [Czech animator] Jan Švankmajer, [the American] Brothers Quay, and [the German] Lauenstein Brothers. What I really responded to in their work was the textural quality of everything – the realism, the grit and grime of it. These creatures were made out of simple, familiar things, and they had everyday objects coming together in interesting ways. Their materials behaved the way materials should. The traditional cinematography that those filmmakers were using also involved a lot of experimental cinema photography. I found that really inspiring, and also very haunting. I wanted to explore that kind of feel, but I wanted it to be more accessible, in a classic narrative, but in that world.
The trick of animation at all times is to get the audience to believe in the world and the characters. In our film, we wanted our audience to believe that these characters are real, and not just that, but that somewhere in these dolls there was humanity trapped inside – they’re the vessels for humanity. Those were the ideas and instincts for making the film the way it is.
8 Are you a lot like the character 1 in the film, who’s described as the “stubborn one”?
You have to be stubborn and tenacious to be an animator, simply because you’re worried about every 1/124th of a second. If you’re concerned about every frame of a film, that’s something that you have to be obsessed about. You have to be that engrossed. I’m not a natural animator or a natural filmmaker. To me, it’s a lot of hard work, and it’s about making mistakes, and having the conviction to change your course and try and fix those mistakes. Solutions always come. It’s about staying at the table and working at it.
9 Are you following the animation world that’s emerging from India?
Definitely. These guys are taking great strides. I have loose associations with a few of these companies like Rhythm & Hues and Prana Studios. There’s an amazing industry in India and a lot of talent coming up there. I’d be very interested in working with these people. |
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