Saturday, October 2, 2010

Short Film Showcase - 9 (2005)

9, 2005.

Written and Directed by Shane Acker.

Produced as a student project at the UCLA Animation Workshop, Shane Acker's 9 is an 11-minute short about a rag doll living in the decaying ruins of a post-apocalyptic Earth. Through flash-backs we learn that 9 is the last of his kind, his people having been hunted down by a mysterious creature known as the Cat Beast, who now pursues 9 across the wasteland leading to a final, climactic confrontation.

Originally intended as a stop-motion project, Acker spent four and a half years working on the computer animated film and it went on to earn a host of awards and accolades including a Student Academy Award for Animation, SIGGRAPH Best in Show, Best Animated Short (Florida Film Festival) and the Special Jury Prize for Outstanding Animation (Indianapolis International Film Festival), in addition to an Academy Award nomination for Animated Short Film in 2005, where it lost out to John Canemaker's The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation.

9 soon came to the attention of filmmaker Tim Burton, who produced a full-length feature adaptation in 2009 with Acker handling directing duties and a cast that included Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer.


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