Salute Your Shorts: Shane Acker's "9" and Other Early Works

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

When one of your friends tells you they’re going to write a book, it’s easy to think to yourself, "Sure, go ahead, waste that time putting out something no one but you and possibly your parents will read and your significant other will skim through enough to answer basic plot questions on when quizzed." It takes a lot of time, but if you’re able to read this column, you also have all the tools you need to write a novel, compose a sonnet, or create a dreary 19th-century period play. All that’s really stopping you from the artistic masterpiece of your dreams is that there’s frequently something good on television.

Films, though, are a whole different matter entirely. While we don’t all wish to make the next Titanic or Lord of the Rings, even mumblecore movies usually cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. YouTube may have supposedly democratized filmmaking, but the primary limiting factor for motion pictures is and probably always will be money. Because of this, it’s always a big surprise when a particularly inexperienced filmmaker is given more than $30 million dollars for a feature film the way Shane Acker was with 9.

Prior to taking the reins on a feature-length version of 9, Acker cut his teeth as a visual-effects artist for WETA, specifically on The Return of the King. Before then, he studied at UCLA, where he worked on "The Hangnail," which came out in 1999. A particularly student-y student film, its gross-out factor and art style has a lot in common with Ren & Stimpy. While it doesn’t have the most fluid animation, it’s still a pretty clever and fun little short. That being said, it doesn’t look or feel much like anything else he’s done since.

Acker’s follow-up to "Hangnail" was made at the UCLA animation workshop and released five years later. "The Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade" is strikingly different to his earlier work, most obviously in the switch from 2-D to 3-D animation. More important is the switch between the type of animation Acker looked to for inspiration, though. "Hangnail"’s sloppiness gave way to an immaculately composed, realistic (as far as a juggling grenade can be said to be realistic) and much more professional look. The central joke of the film, that Mr. Grenade pulls one of his pins and self-destructs, is just as morbid as its predecessor, but the intentional crudeness is gone.

Still, there’s no denying that "Mr. Grenade" is ultimately more of a tech demo with a fun gag than a real film. Only a year later, though, he completed a much more ambitious work that had been in progress for a long, long time. Before he decided to go for a second masters in animation, Acker took some animation courses on the side because of a life-long interest in comics. In a storyboard class he created the numbered sack-characters who populate the universe of 9.This was in 1998. It wasn't until 2001 that he kicked off the actual production of the short, which didn't premiere until Sundance 2005.

"9" the short film is easily mistaken for the feature, at least judging from the trailers, as it focuses on the same basic characters. The sentient rag doll 9 and his (?) mentor 5 are spotted by a Cat Beast, who’s covered in the sacks of 9’s fallen kin. He takes down 5 and, for lack of a better explanation, sucks the sack’s soul out before going after 9. 9 eventually bests the Cat Beast and kills him, allowing him to retrieve his friend’s soul-canister and combine it with a gem to release the souls of his deceased kin.

Despite what Acker’s earlier films would suggest, there’s nary a slapstick moment in the short, which takes itself extremely seriously. And ultimately "9" is just two fight scenes with a pretty and oddly-haunting epilogue. But within those constraints, Acker creates a unique and fully-realized world for his odd little sack-people to dwell (or perhaps more often fail to dwell) in. Its dystopian universe, where a functioning light bulb among the landscape’s wreckage is of vital importance, is what makes the short into something more. While there’s obviously a bit of Pixar in its physics and a few references, its world evokes a darker tone than most American animation, likely the reason it attracted Tim Burton’s notice in the first place.

Also like Pixar’s early shorts, its silence both evokes classical shorts and places the emphasis firmly on visuals. The nearly five years Acker put into the short shows through the level of detail put into every shot; from lighting to textures, it feels like a singular work. Violence isn’t gratuitous and its gritty backdrop feels more like a part of the story than just a way of tapping into a trendy aesthetic. It’s perhaps not the world’s most mind-blowing short, but it’s certainly more than a calling-card film and combines craft with storytelling in a way only the best animation can.

Since its release, "9" went on to an Academy Award nomination, which it lost, and a series of wins at other festivals and showcases, including the SIGGRAPH technology conference, where Pixar’s first shorts were released decades before. Tim Burton’s interest in the short has since then made Acker one of the quickest-rising stars in Hollywood. Let’s hope he doesn’t go the way Sky Captain’s Kerry Conran did with his short-to-feature venture not too long ago.