You're in the Entertainment - Movies section

'9' animator had many hills to climb

Published online on Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

E-Mail Print

Managing costs was one of the biggest challenges for animation director Joe Ksander and his team in making "9."

They wanted to create a movie with the same rich look and texture of other recent CGI movies, but had a smaller budget. Ksander wouldn't talk specifics, but he says "9" cost about one-third of what big animation studios like Disney and Pixar spend.

That could have been a real problem because the film looks at a massive post-Apocalyptic world where a group of nine dolls who have come to life must defend themselves from a mechanical monster.

Even the number of explosions was limited because of cost.

"I think the fact we had budget limits made us work harder. We had to think of more creative ways to do a scene," Ksander says in a telephone interview about the film, which opened Wednesday.

Another big animation expense is creating human-looking characters. To get around that, the team used fleeting or limited images of humans.

Budget wasn't the only problem during the three years of production -- the filmmakers also had to work hard to create the right perspective.

Eight-inch rag dolls live in this full-size world. Just showing them with regular-size buildings did not get across the true perspective. As Ksander says, the buildings did not look large, they just looked far away.

Small items were placed in the foreground and slightly larger items in the background to reinforce the size of the characters.

The design of the dolls, particularly their camera lens shutter eyes, was another problem.

"It is hard to be emotive with those kind of eyes. We talked about giving the dolls more human eyes but then decided to have them show emotion through the way they moved their heads and bodies. That's different than other animated films," Ksander says.