Connelly plays this superhero-ish character and she never had to train to do it. "I would love to, by the way, because that sounds like so much fun to me. My husband is doing an action film now and he’s training and it just looks like so much fun. But this was great, too. It was a great, great character but I didn’t have to stress out about my moves and whether I could pull it off," said Connelly at 9's LA press day.
Connelly says she was a real fan of Acker's original short film that spawned this longer, feature-length movie. "I thought it was beautiful. I thought he really had a vision. I thought he was incredibly talented, he being Shane Acker. I kind of just thought it’d be a nice thing to be a part of," said Connelly. "I was curious about the process. I was curious about what he would do with it. It was a movie that I wanted to see having seen the short film."
"I think that the additional characters that he’s created are really beautifully rendered and interesting characters," explained Connelly. "I like the overall storyline. I think it’s interesting. I like that they’re living in the aftermath of some great conflict that’s come out of the tension between man and machine and spirit and machine, but that each side holds part of the talisman, the reason and the spirit. And that they need to be integrated for the soul to be liberated. I think it’s nice."
9 isn't the typical lighthearted animated fare as it touches on important moral issues, but Connelly believes the audience is ready to embrace it. "I think that American audiences have become more and more familiar with a different kind of animated film over the years. So I mean, certainly Miyazaki’s films to cite one example, have a much more mature content within that framework. For people who love animated films, I don't think it will be a shock in that way. But certainly it’s not Lady and the Tramp. It’s a very different kind of enterprise, so it’s not a little kids film."
Doing voice work can be a lonely process for actors used to interacting with their co-stars on a film set. In a lot of instances, the stars of an animated film won't even meet until they get together for the film's press tour. "I did one other session with Elijah Wood but as it turned out, the day that they had us together, we didn’t really have that much to do together so it was more, it was really nice to meet him and I thought he was really lovely and incredibly nice guy. We sort of more watched each other work, which was also fun but it’s a really strange, entirely different endeavor, I think," offered Connelly.
Asked if she liked the experience, Connelly replied, "I enjoyed it. I mean, you feel differently about it than a film that you’re shooting for so many months. I guess also this film in particular, the dialogue is pretty sparse. It’s not like some animated films where the characters are sort of playing off each other and have a sort of banter going on, a lot of intense scenes together with a lot of dialogue. It’s pretty limited what we actually say. So certainly, I had a great time. I would certainly do it again, but it feels very different than that level of involvement that you have working on a live action film."
Acker was able to provide his voice cast with drawings to help them get into their characters. "I saw pretty detailed renderings of what the character would look like, but not much actual animated footage because we came in quite early on in the process to start recording. And I think it was sort of a give and take where they filmed us while we were recording. I think they tried to take some mannerisms and movements and head tilts or whatever it is that they took from when we would all speak, and then integrate those into the character. In turn, we would then go back and see little bits of what they had done and try to work off that," said Connelly.
* * * * * *
9 hits theaters on 09/09/09 and is rated PG-13 for violence and scary images.
