Unlike most fanboys, I wasn’t salivating at the thought of a live action take on The Last Airbender. Not because I’m not into cartoons and crap obviously, but because I once worked for Virgin TV, where I was forced to quality check the entire thing at triple speed in one sitting, so heading back into an – by all reports – vastly inferior version of the weird flying bison world wasn’t really firing me up to start with.
That said, I did develop a weird affinity for the whole thing as it burned itself into my retinas so I was willing to give it a decent chance, but given that Roger Ebert of all people took time out from spouting overlong, boring quotations on twitter just to call M.Night Shyamalan an idiot over this, the signs didn’t look great.
Adapted from Shane Acker’s own 2005 Oscar-nominated animated short, 9 is a weighty slab of CG sci fi that owes more to Alexander Reynolds than Pixar, bright colours and loveable characters replaced with grim, menacing situations and a serious lack of laughs. Indeed, it even seems dark for producer Tim Burton; stripped of the dry, moribund humour that characterised Batman and particularly Beetlejuce, this is very much Acker’s baby, and a very unhappy one at that.
Having long had an affinity for the disaffected family unit, Wes Anderson is a curiously fine fit for Hollywood’s latest crack at Roald Dahl’s books, kitting out the eponymous Mr. Fox and his family in a wardrobe that would work just as well on any of the Tenembaums, and working hard to imbue a light airy plot with a sense of comfortable familiarity.
