When 9’s Shane Acker found animation by accident at UCLA, he discovered a medium that combined all his interests — sculpture, painting, architecture, illustration. All 9 images © Shane Acker.

The five animated shorts nominated for an Oscar this year represent an eclectic mix that, strung together, would nevertheless make for a fine evening out at the local InfiniPlex: Shane Acker’s post-apocalyptic thriller 9; Mark Andrews and Andrew Jimenez’ One Man Band (scheduled to open in front of Pixar’s Cars this June); John Canemaker’s intimate paternal biography The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation; Sharon Colman’s charmer Badgered; and Anthony Lucas’ mini-epic shadow play The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

It should come as no surprise that animator Shane Acker is also a trained architect. The eye-popping detail of his post-human action thriller 9 suggests a world-maker who didn’t just write a lot of history books or draw a lot of plans but who actually laid his fair share of cornerstones. In the piece, a living rag doll named 9 with a body built of burlap is hunted by a skeletonized cat-beast. With wit and deception, 9 eventually lures the beast through a disaster landscape into a trap where it is finally vanquished.

Acker pursued his undergraduate degree in architecture at the University of Florida, considering it a natural extension of a singular childhood obsession. “I was a hyperactive kid,” Acker says, “and my parents bought me a drawing table to curb my excess energy. My mom had this great set of books from Brian Froud, and all these great fantasy illustrators, and I would copy those guys and just draw, draw, draw all day long.” He followed the architect track as far as graduate school, and only fell into animation by accident while filling some electives at UCLA. “I was like, ‘This is what I should have been doing the whole time!’“ Acker laughs. “It just combined all my interests — sculpture, painting, architecture, illustration — into one medium.”

Already a cinephile with roots firmly planted in Brazil and the Brothers Quay, making his first two animated films The Hangnail and Mr. Grenade (both viewable at ShaneAcker.com) was a natural next step. “We studied a fair amount of movies, actually, in architecture school,” he says. “We studied so many kinds of disciplines in art and media, to try to pull ideas into and inform the design we were doing.” Riding on the success of Hangnail, a Spike & Mike favorite, Acker yearned to develop something more substantial.

After working four and a half years on 9, Acker found a receptive audience. He even got Tim Burton to sign on to exec produce a theatrical version for Focus Features.

By making 9 as his graduate thesis, Acker was able to take his time and get it right — although his progress at one point was so sluggish he had to drop everything and make the priceless one-shot, one-set gag film Mr. Grenade just to keep his sanity. “I must have been in school for about 11 years,” he giggles. “But I love studying. And the second time around, graduate school, it made a lot more sense to me. It was funny — Mark Andrews spoke at our school, and he said, ‘You guys don’t realize the position you’re in. Believe me, I’m out working in the industry right now, and you’re never going to get this opportunity to do what you want, so make the best of it.’ I really took that to heart.”

Acker’s discipline for details and place-making gives the world of 9 a startling depth, and he worked out the back-story to a similar degree. He won’t over-elaborate, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, but he does say the gist of the story came from Beowulf. “I wanted to make a story in which the humans have all destroyed themselves. All that’s left is the detritus they left behind. But from that, a new sort of life is forming. And that’s where 9 begins, where they have these devices left over from the humans, and they’re trying to figure out how they work and what their logic is… and there’s this beast that’s driven by instinct rather than intellect, and it’s trying to take that intellect from them. That’s why it’s hunting them down, stealing their souls and sewing their skins onto its back.”

Finishing 9 became his love’s labor, as Acker took a leave of absence from UCLA and made a subsistence living one job at a time. “Then when the job was done,” he says, “I would just not answer the phone, and keep my head low until the money ran out, and then pop my head back out of the gopher hole and find another freelance gig.” When 9 was finished and started making the festival circuit, his hard work paid off — he found an agent, and then he met a producer, and the producer got excited about 9.

“After four and a half years working on the film,” he says, “I was ready to walk away and do something else. But what’s great is that it’s a proof of concept. You show it to people, they get it. They understand the world.” Re-energized by all the outside interest, Acker wrote a feature treatment and pitched it to Mike Simpson, Tim Burton’s agent. Now Burton is set to executive produce a movie version of 9 for Focus Features.

Production-wise Acker is in terra incognita now, but so far he’s survived. “I don’t have training for a lot of the experiences I’m having now, so I’m just winging it, and trying to stay true to what I want to do.”

Because of rights issues, he can’t sell 9 on home video; but for the lucky few who already have a copy, there’s a cornucopia of eye candy and new connections to be gleaned from every viewing — a main character with lenses for eyes and film for a brain who has a flashback in the form of a scratchy 16mm print; design riffs on paintings by Klimt and Matta; and a thousand other Easter eggs and shout-outs to everyone who influenced this, for the most part, solitary artist. Beyond the fine sound design of David Steinwedel and Earganic’s electronica score, 9 is effectively a focused look at all the art history that’s been running around Shane Acker’s skull for half a decade. “About 80-90% of what you’re seeing up there,” he says, “is me pushing the boulder up the hill for about four and a half years.”