9

Ranked strictly on big ideas and gorgeous animation, "9" rates four stars. Trouble is, this postapocalyptic vision, teeming with monstrous machines, "stitchpunk" knights and nonstop battle sequences, goes way too thin on story and character. Expanded from Shane Acker's 11-minute, Academy Award-nominated short (2005), "9" is "Lord of the Rings"-lite, a watered-down and fast-forwarded version of that epic quest's complex narrative arc. There's even a ring of power in "9," a round, symbol-engraved device that, once socketed, spells awful destruction or potential resurrection.

What's lost in Acker's showdown between diminutive ragdolls and a soul-eating, scarlet-eyed spider-machine is any hint of grandeur, the overarching sense of something of inestimable value at risk. Despite obvious similarities in plot and imagery, the satanic machine in "9" never inspires the kind of bone-deep dread emanating from the Eye of Sauron. And it's hard to get excited about saving the Shire for a tribe of 8-inch-tall, rag-and-metal dolls.

Standing in for heroic hobbits are ambulatory burlap sacklets, with camera lenses for eyes and zippers to keep their innards in place. Created by a scientist to repopulate the world following humankind's obliteration by supersized machines, the tiny fabric-folk of "9" possess minimalist personalities. Numbered 1 through 9, they remain "types." Call them Hero (Elijah Wood), Sidekick (John C. Reilly), Warrior (Jennifer Connelly), Inventor (Martin Landau), Brawn (Fred Tatasciore), Artist (Crispin Glover), Bookworms and Bishop (Christopher Plummer). Short on expressive physogs, they rarely push the predictable limits of their neatly allegorical functions. Often it's difficult to tell one burlap baggie from another: Only the Bishop's face conveys idiosyncratic character, almost perfectly catching Plummer's real-life looks and mannerisms.

We learn how our world ended through newsreels projected from the eyes of twin librarians 3 and 4, mutes who communicate via eye-beams of light. A scientist, blessed and cursed with godlike creativity, built a thinking machine that could itself make other devices in its own image to better serve man. Naturally, a warmongering tyrant taught the machines to murder, and before long the monsters gassed all of humankind. (Some of the heavy-metal killers are topped with Nazi-like helmeting.) At the final hour, the scientist zapped his fellowship of nine into life, hoping these unlikely little heroes might wrest the world away from the machines.

The wasteland of "9" might be a European city pulverized by bombs, dimmed into sepia tones by toxic gases. Windstorms rage through the streets, where desiccated corpses huddle in cars. It's civilization laid waste by hugely malevolent forces, evoking the gloomy, postapocalyptic paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski. Nine and his valiant allies descend through labyrinthine tunnels and pipes into an industrial underworld where the demonic machine spawns more of its kind in the forms of misshapen worms, moths and bats. Think "steampunk" gestalt, an homage to the kind of Victorian alternate mechanics featured in "Dune" and, more recently, "Steamboy."

Significantly, the fire-belching chimneys topping the mechanical Satan's hellish foundry mirror the spire of the cathedral where 1 (armored in bishop's mitre and crook) and his bullyboy 8 browbeat the surviving stitchpunks into hiding out, paralyzed by fear. Everything in "9" points toward a Sam Harris take on religion. Having become prison, the cathedral must fall before evolution can occur and the fellowship can move on to the library to find the knowledge that may bring them salvation.

Ambitious concepts, but never really fleshed out in any meaningful way, and totally buried by the bravura, wildly kinetic engagements between 9's plucky crew and flocks of machines from hell.

There's much that's derivative in "9," especially when it comes to themes peculiar to Tim Burton, who co-produced with Timur Bekmambetov ("Night Watch"). From his early animation "Frankenweenie" to "Edward Scissorhands," Burton loves his Dr. Frankensteins, mostly beneficent bringers of life to dead or inanimate things. Half-scientist, half-magician, his creators often make Adams unfit or too good for human society. Clearly, as an artist, a cinematic animator of creepy and/or charming creatures, Burton counts himself a member of this fraternity.

So it's not surprising that the first shot in "9" should be the giant eye of a scientist-creator, or that this quest climaxes with a spectacular magic lantern show releasing all the souls of stitchpunks sucked into the master machine's ravenous red orb. Acker-Burton-Bekmambetov tickle us with notions about the power for good or ill projected in the creative vision, in movie-making itself. But the tickle's only a tease.

There's one rare moment of stillness that delivers perhaps the eeriest, most evocative visual charge in the relentless weirdness of "9." In the library courtyard, bathed in the ghostly light of a full moon, tall sculptures of godlike humans stand guard over the collected knowledge and achievement of a whole civilization. Eight, the brawny (but still only 8 inches tall) stitchpunk one reviewer aptly compared to the Michelin Man, settles down on a statue's huge stone hand to destress with his version of getting high: Holding a magnet over his head, he trips out on its pleasurable effect upon his metal parts. Hard to know whether to laugh out loud at this alien doper, or shed a tear for the appalling loss of everything human.

Also: '9': Animation For All Ages

Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.