NINE - A Fable on Determinism and the Absurd

NINE is an AI-assisted animated short about free will, causality, and our search for purpose. It follows Ernie, a wooden marionette who grows from a curious child into an engineer, carrying a small brass ring simply because he likes it. An unexpected journey brings this ordinary possession into contact with an extraordinary machine.

The film’s literary inspirations include Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams. Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan inspired the unsettling disproportion between an elaborate human life and a seemingly trivial mechanical purpose.¹ Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy contributed another element: deadpan cosmic absurdity, in which an immense structure of expectation can culminate in an answer that is simultaneously clear and profoundly unsatisfying.² NINE brings these sensibilities into a small, tactile world where an entire life can culminate in something absurdly modest.

Its philosophical foundation draws on Alfred R. Mele’s Zygote Argument, developed in Free Will and Luck.³ Diana’s intervention translates this problem into marionette imagery: she establishes Ernie’s initial conditions rather than continuously directing his later actions. Ernie still reasons, hesitates, develops preferences, and chooses. The film asks whether being the author of a decision also makes us the author of the person making it—and whether an apparent creator stands outside the causal order at all. It leaves those questions unresolved rather than treating the nonexistence of free will as a foregone conclusion.

Visually and musically, Rolling Sky 2’s “FATE I” was another important reference, particularly for its piano-forward treatment of material derived from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and its relationship between rhythmic propulsion and orchestral expansion.⁴ NINE develops its own score from Beethovenian material, with piano driving physical action and strings often extending, shadowing, or enlarging what the piano has already introduced. Recurring musical ideas change shape as Ernie’s world expands, creating a musical parallel to the film’s central tension between varied experience and persistent underlying causes.