Here are a few things one should learn in the first year of film school (or from any basic text on the subject):

Style is not story.

Cliches are not characterization.

Vagueness and confusion are not mystery.

Stating the obvious is not communication.

Telling the audience what they’re supposed to feel is not the same as making them feel.

And a teacher or author with even minimal industry experience will let everyone in on the secret that “visionary” and “genius” are terms spread about as freely as fertilizer on flower beds, and for largely the same reason.

9, as an entertainment, lurches along from stock scene to stock scene with little of substance for connective tissue. As a production, it presents one of one of those all-too-frequent Hollywood murder  mysteries: how does a “visionary” director, backed by a big budget and a raft of people who claim to know better, deliver a corpse to the theatres? It is not intentional, of course; nobody, as they say, ever sets out to make a bad movie.

The story is the killer here, though it does not act alone; dialogue and acting, both animated and audio, are enthusiastic accomplices.

It’s hardest  to judge the voice acting with dialogue that, when it bothers to stray beyond gasps of astonishment or sympathy, is so hackneyed and amateurish that it makes one long for the return of silent movies. Ten minutes into the movie, my wife and I were able to whisper the next line before it occurred on-screen with an alarming degree of accuracy.

Every good animator I’ve ever known, from the meat-and-potatoes practitioner to the stars of the feature film world all say that animation is acting, and they are just actors giving their performance via a pencil or a computer. Making things move is a technical skill that anyone can learn. The making things move aspect of 9 is smooth and polished, but the question arises if the animators -all of them– were uniformly unskilled in acting, or whether they were directed that way. I have no idea, but the end result is the same: a meaningless mix of stock 19th century gestures and television cliches. There were a few moments when I was ready to rush the screen if one more character tilted their head sideways and smiled ‘softly’ to show love, understanding, acceptance, appreciation or the five million other emotions that apparently can be conveyed by that motion.

I ever saw the short film 9 is based on, but I’m thinking that it would provide a better experience, and not just because it was shorter. The story might seem more clever if compressed into 20 minutes. But the feature version is a tedious retread of ideas from all over the place, without any striking new spice to flavor the stew, or to at least mask the taste of moralizing.

The visuals are obviously the strong point of the show, and there is a lot of great design work, though I’m not sure all of it is as revolutionary as the promotional material makes it out to be. Check out any fantasy illustration magazine, or even a Photoshop or Painter how-to magazine and you’ll see a lot of similar environments. The character design is the most interesting, but alas, if they don’t do anything, I’d rather just buy the ‘Art of–’ book.

In a lot of ways, 9 reminds me of another ‘visionary’ film, Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow, which shares all the same faults: unique visuals that get tedious after fifteen minutes of nothing much going on. Or the original Tron, which put it’s most interesting visuals right at the start of the movie, then failed to develop anything worthwhile to occur within them. Terrific movies –terrific stories– have been made with no effects, with mediocre acting, with editing that was nothing more than stringing pieces of film together: Chan is Missing, Pi, even Night of the Living Dead. But none without stories; even though film-makers David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard stretch the limits of stories, they still tell them. You may not like them, but you won’t be mouthing the dialogue in advance.

Steve Spielberg knew that in Jurassic Park, once you’d seen the CGI dinosaurs, you’d seen them. The surprise was over, the present opened, the baby born. The awe and wonder would diminish exponentially every time he showed a new species or vista unless there was something interesting happening! It’s a lesson Tim Burton –who likely is a visionary– has still not mastered. He was just the mentor Shane Black didn’t need.