"It's not just man against machine, because our heroes are machines, as well... but it's the humanity within the machine, tempering the machine with morality... empathy... compassion." Commonalities of humans: The characters' lack of verbal speech and near-identical appearances were intended to highlight the innate ways that every person is alike with only certain individual aspects that set us apart. This contributes to the similarities between the rag dolls and humans. Humans and nature: Acker has said that the "post-human" setting of the film is the result of a man-made apocalypse, but nature has inevitably reclaimed the world. In this way, nature is inseparable from mankind. Production 9 was originally supposed to last three minutes, but was later extended to ten. It was meant to be a stop-motion film, but was later made using CGI. The 2D elements of the film were made by drawing, painting, and using Photoshop. The puppet characters and stop-motion animation were inspired by those in the film Balance directed by Wolfgang and Cristoph Lauenstein. Awards Awarded Student Academy Award – Gold Award for Animation SIGGRAPH – Best in Show Animex – First Prize, 3D Character Animation Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation College Awards – First Prize, Non-traditional Animation Florida Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Festival – Best Animated Short Nominated Academy Award – Best Animated Short, lost to The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation Feature film 9 is a computer animated feature film (which the short film accompanied on DVD and Blu-ray) adapted from the short film. It was produced in part by Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov, and Jim Lemley, and released on September 9, 2009 by Focus Features. Shane Acker stayed on as director and the screenplay was written by Pamela Pettler. The lead voice actors are Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau, Crispin Glover, Fred Tatasciore, and Christopher Plummer. See also List of animated feature films of 2005 List of science fiction films References External links 2005 short films 2005 computer-animated films 2005 science fiction films 2000s American animated films 2000s animated short films American animated short films American animated science fantasy films American robot films American science fiction adventure films Animated films without speech Animated post-apocalyptic films Animated thriller films Computer-animated short films Films based on urban legends Focus Features animated films Focus Features films