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Nine was predicted by The Beatles
Number nine... number nine... number nine... number nine... number nine...
This film is gonna get another title when it hits DVD to pacify the Moral Guardians.
Okay, we have two films released in the same year with homonymic titles. One is an animated feature which can at least pretend to be suitable for kids (even if it is post-apocalyptic), and which has been a hit this fall. The other is this one, a film of a musical based on a Fellini art film that has, as one of its major elements, a Love Dodecahedron. And this film has not had much buzz yet; unless that changes, it's not gonna break any box office records.
If they release this film with this title, then there will be at least some parents crying for blood when they find out this isn't the CGI cartoon. Therefore, the distributors for the DVD vs. will have to find another title.
9 is that song by system of a down
Ever notice that
1 all life is destroyed by robots
2 automatons are fighting robots
The Scientist is a descendant of Paracelsus.
This explains why he had the book explaining the transfer of souls to creations.
The Scientist was a descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
The Paracelsus documents were merely one chapter in How I Did It. The Scientist just didn't have enough time to grow nine homunculi (or even one) that would be large enough to survive outside of the flask immediately after instilling it with life, and even if he had, it would have risked being susceptible to the poison gas.
The rain containing pieces of the souls of the dead stitchpunks instills life.
9, 7, 3 and 4 will be able to create a race of stitchpunks using items the rain has touched and the designs of the Scientist.
The Fabrication Machine turned its creations against humanity out of anger at the Chancellor's actions.
It was experiencing trauma after being taken away from his "father" and finally decided it had to take revenge not only against the Chancellor, but against the entire race that allowed such a person to become so powerful and corrupt.
The soul bits in the rain have turned into microbes, which will restart biological life.
That's sure what they look like.
1 symbolizes the pope
He's a cranky old man. His hat looks like the pope's hat. He has absolutist views and harsh morality. He demands total subservience from his followers. He even sets up shop in a cathedral, come on people! The whole thing can be viewed as a religious allegory, with all the characters symbolizing different roles and denominations.
the remaining Stitchpunks repopulate the world...with other stitchpunks
This is what 9 was meant for, to create more of his kind, to reproduce. We see this symbolically in his phallic zipper(even more so in the first scene where it's pulled down), and in the fact that he is the one chosen by 7, the only female. At the end of the movie, they're left to be the 'father' and 'mother' of a new humanity. 3 and 4 survived because they're the only two who have the knowledge to master the stitchpunk creating techniques of their creator. They make it practically possible.
The Fabrication Machine is an alternate universe GLaDOS.
When we see the machine after it has been made, it looks a lot like the modules that make up GLaDOS. Or it could alternately be HAL or AUTO. Mainly, it's that they're all (semi)sentient machines created by man to do good, but become evil. Also, they all share the whole "one eye that glows red" thing.
The Fabrication Machine has a very hungry soul...the soul of MANDRAKK!
Going with the above, the entire film is an AU of WALL-E.
The creation of robotics goes much earlier than planned. The chancellor was actually the CEO of Buy n Large. 9, 7, and 5 are the counterparts of Wall-E, EVE, and M-O. Also, Wizard of Oz replaces Hello, Dolly! as the main character's superficial attachment to humanity.
Each Puppet is a Significant Part of the Scientist's identity
He did not, or was unable to, plan for each of the personalities of the puppets, but they each embody a part of him, starting with how he self identifies: One is a stubborn old man, but a leader, and Two is a brilliant inventor, but still an old man. Three and Four embody the part of him that want to gain knowledge and pass it on - he knew that Knowledge is a lonely path, so he made two of them so they wouldn't be lonely. Five is farther from the Scientist's own identity - someone who trusts and works with people.
However, as the Scientist kept making puppets, he had less and less of himself to give. Six, the imagination of every good inventor, can barely interact with others. Seven embodies aspects that the Scientist didn't even know he had - namely, Female and Badass. And Eight is, as Terry Pratchett would put it, the part of the brain that's still a monkey - subservient, strong, focusing on primal urges. That's why the Scientist waited a long time before making Nine - he wanted to make one more puppet that would be worth it, that he could give everything to. And thus, Nine is also the one thing that the Scientist always wanted to be, but never thought he could - a Hero.
9 is a prequel to WALL-E
The rainstorms at the end of the film carried over to the storms seen in WALL-E, and allowed the plant to grow.
The apocalyptic world is not the entire world- only America.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is wondering why their American friends haven't called in the last few months.
The war between men and machines ended with either side killing each other off.
The scientist was the last man alive during the war, and was possibly spared by the machines due to him being a sort of "father" figure according to the Fabrication Machine. Once the scientist got close enough to it, he tore out the talisman and took it back to his lab to finish creating the 9- being the last one alive he wanted to ensure that humanity's legacy wouldn't die with him.
7, the only girl in the stitchpunk team, is the feminine part of the scientist's soul
Every man has a tiny part of womanhood within him. Whether he admits it or not depends on how homophobic he is.
The stitchpunks were supposed to be assimilated into the Fabrication Machine.
The scientist, horrified that the Machine had intelligence but not a conscience, intended to pour his soul into his creation to give it true life; unfortunately, by the time he had discovered how to do so, the war was already reaching its climax. After tearing his soul and pouring it into the stitchpunks to become immune the life-killing gas, he meant for them to survive the wasteland long enough to be "captured" and "eaten" by the Machine, thus granting it its creator's sapience and allowing the Fabrication Machine to rebuild society. With this thinking in mind, 9 suddenly becomes just as misguided as 1: by trying to "free" the others, 9 is robbing the world of its intended rebirth and reconstruction, barring a rain of stitchpunk soul bacteria. Is there a trope for Technology Is Not Evil?
You see, 0 (called 0 because 0 is more gothic than 10) has the powers to bring the killed stitchpunks back to life (because 1, 2, 5, 6 n' 8 (Ha! Get it? Like Ed Edd N Eddy) dying is really pathetic), and they have to fight with "the stitchpunk-killing machine"! Wow. That sounds... odd... when saying it spelled correctly.]]
In the original short
Its soultaking device was meant to bring the 9 to the site of a ritual for which the stitchpunks were originally made. 9, possibly along with 5 and the others, was "programmed" to know how to do the ritual, but not what it meant, and left it as a sign of respect. When 5's spirit nodded back at 9, it wasn't "you did good, kid", it was "everything's going to be okay" (since the stitchpunks didn't understand their purpose until they were together in the machine).
 , the monster was a good guy. Had the fabrication machine ate all the stitchpunks souls...
He'd become the scientist again, but in a corrupted metal body, one that can't talk... or scream... ?
The monster in the original short was another 9th.
Or, rather, a 10th. A soul fragment, anyway. It was the scientist's aggression, and the last fragment. Unlike the other sackdolls, it took off its sack (or put pieces of armor around it) and added pieces, or even never had a sack added in the first place since the scientist died (or was killed, I'm going to go with "died" since it's less depressing) before he could add the sackskin.
The machine is "0"
When the scientist gave the brain life, he gave it a bit of his soul, just like his other 9 creations. The only problem was, he gave it plenty of his intellect, but not enough of his personality. It was corrupted by war and turned against it's own soldiers in an attempt at revenge for taking it away from the scientist. It found the scientist and planned to reunite them, but the scientist knew that 0 couldn't turn back from it's path of destruction now and deactivated it and took back the talisman. The machines continued fighting without it, and the scientist built the 9 stitchpunks in order to finally end the war when humanity was gone. It explains why the machine shows some emotion despite not having a "soul" in the movie, it does have a soul, just a corrupted one.
The Scientist had DID.
The Stitchpunks are all his different egos. Would also explain the varying ages (1 and 2 are old men, 3 and 4 are children, everyone else is a younger adult) and 7 being a female.
The Fabrication Machine had no personality to begin with.
It was just a piece of machinery designed to fullfil a purpose: make weapons. When the Scientist (who actually knew how the thing worked) was removed from supervising its progress, the idiots assigned to it were instructed by the Chancellor to either give it an upgrade or turn its directive more toward war - and in doing so they accidently altered the programming so that it considered all living things a target. Therefore, it set about efficiently fullfilling its task. The Scientist knew to hide from it, because if it had found him, it wouldn't have "recognized him" or shown him any special mercy as a father.
Knowing everything was going to die, the Scientist created the stitchpunks to continue the culture and emotions of humanity once the poison gas hit. 1, 7, and 8 were supposed to protect group until the last of the machines had stopped functioning, 3 and 4 were supposed to retain the culture and knowledge necessary to restart a civilization, and 2 and 5 were supposed to physically build that civilization. 9, having a little of each in him, was supposed to be a general helper. Since he was the last created, he was entrusted with the talisman in case any of the other stitchpunks had been already caught and had their souls sucked out. It was never intended to be put BACK into the Fabrication Machine once the machine had gone offline. Once the stitchpunks had the beginnings of civilization preserved, they would live out their lives and eventually run down. Their life force would return to the earth via the soil/water/whatever covered their bodies when they ran down, and restart evolution with cells and such. Eventually, something would evolve that was intelligent enough to understand the preserved scraps of humanity, and civilization would get a little jump-start and continue from there.
3 and 4 share a memory bank.
3 is primarily Input, 4 is primarily Output (the order in which they were made was probably because it might be possible for someone to bring the information out of a storage for which no output has been made, but you can't extract information that isn't there in the first place. Which is which in the guess was based on information given in the movie, not based on this idea.) They may be Single-Minded Twins, but since they are 3 and 4 (rather than 4 and 4) and have differing... habits, I figure they have different processing units (then again, they could act different like how the eyes of a human act different from the mouth, but I still go with my impression that all they share is a memory bank, not a processor, and especially not a soul shard).
The Scientist's Legacy contained, not just a placard that said "hope", but a hermetic seal.
...within the box, though you can't see it, are a vast number of spores and cultures that would be released once the box was opened, in hopes that the gas would have dissipated by then. This is why 9 took so long to wake up (long enough for the scientist's body to have withered to an emaciated, grey mummy without microorganisms to help break it down, and long enough for 1-7 and probably eight to have been there for "years without [9]", in the words of 1 in a separate deleted scene). The Scientist didn't know that the soul rain would spawn viable microorganisms, and this was "The Last" "Hope" for the future of living things, without relying on pure chance to start up another abiogenesis.
The scientist programmed the Fabrication Machine, before he made the sackdolls but after he knew it would be taken away...
In order to give it instructions to "once you stop receiving others' orders to build machines, create something to find this talisman and plug it into you, at any cost. you'll know what to do then". Whether he had the foresight to add, "...once you stop being given orders" or not and whether it involved Ambiguous Syntax would make it possible that this was what made the machine turn on alt!Germany, rather than the Chancellor's idiocy or the Fabrication Machine acting out at the people who took it from its parent.
Making 9 didn't kill the scientist.
He just had a heart attack from the stress, or bumped up the timing of 9's ensoulment because the machines had just arrived and were using the gas (that's why he hadn't noticeably decayed, and was shrivelled instead of decayed). Souls with pieces torn off can regenerate, and the scientist would have survived the process and possibly been able to make more sackdolls if he'd been given time to recover.
9 was curiosity.
Bad idea.
The timeline splits between the short and the film based on which version of the amulet the Scientist uses.
The one in the short was a failsafe, it could absorb the soul shards from the sackdolls and store them until all 9 pieces could be placed in the Fabrication Machine, via the second half of the talisman. This way, the Fabrication Machine wouldn't have to be awake and have the sackdolls brought to it, the Hunter could just plug in the soul as soon as it got all the pieces regardless of the Machine's status (as long as it wasn't destroyed). However, with the extra time spent in making the advanced (but more junky-looking) talisman, he had to speed up production of the sackdolls, make them all pretty uniform. The Hunter machine was based on the same prototype, but had rebuilt itself from the longer time it required to take down each of the sackdolls (since it didn't need to take them alive, it actually succeeded, at least partly). Five developed a more mentor-ly role by the time 9 arrived because 2 and 1 were already dead, and decided not to fix 9's voice box (if it was broken in the first place, or he even had one) because that was one of the ways the catbeast tracked them. Different way for the talisman to work, no fabrication machine's reawakening, and no machines aside form the catbeast. Everything stems from the Scientist taking different amounts of time to build a talisman that worked slightly differently.
The stitchpunks are elements of civilization.
This does not contradict the idea that they are fragments of souls (after all human society is the product of humans):
The world of 9 is the same one described in the song "99 Red Balloons".
You and I in a little toy shop/
buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got/
Set them free at the break of dawn/
'Til one by one, they were gone/
Back at base, bugs in the software/
Flash the message, "Something's out there"/
Floating in the summer sky/
99 red balloons go by./
99 red balloons floating in the summer sky/
Panic bells, it's red alert/
There's something here from somewhere else/
The war machine springs to life/
Opens up one eager eye/
Focusing it on the sky/
Where 99 red balloons go by./
99 Decision Street, 99 ministers meet/
To worry, worry, super-scurry/
Call the troops out in a hurry/
This is what we've waited for/
This is it boys, this is war/
The president is on the line/
As 99 red balloons go by./
99 Knights of the air/
ride super-high-tech jet fighters/
Everyone's a Superhero/
Everyone's a Captain Kirk/
With orders to identify/
To clarify and classify/
Scramble in the summer sky/
As 99 red balloons go by./
99 dreams I have had/
In every one a red balloon/
It's all over and I'm standin' pretty/
In this dust that was a city/
If I could find a souvenier/
Just to prove the world was here.../
And here is a red balloon/
I think of you and let it go/
9 is a prequel to Bionicle .
The surviving sackdolls eventually grew in power, upgraded their forms, and became the Great Beings. The human souls became protodermis, and the Matoran/Agori are more advanced versions of the stitchpunk design.
There are more Stitchpunks out there, alive.
Over the course of the film, we only see one city in one country. It's highly unlikely that only one person ever had the idea of making, basically "golems," and infusing them with a human soul. Therefore, in some other cities, some other countries out there, there has to be more Stitchpunks, maybe different in design, but there IS more of them. Because come on, it would really suck if the only living things in the whole entire world were 9, 7, and the twins.
The stitchpunks have very short lifespans.
The film is clearly set very soon after the war ended: there's no rust on any of the weapons and human bodies haven't started decomposing yet. But, the stitchpunks have been around long enough for 7 to have gotten sick of 1's authority and left and for 2 to be forced out because he was 'too old'. Since Terry Pratchett influences are all over the film it's safe enough (in WMG) to assume that there could be the whole 'short lived things see time go slower' thing going on. Thus, the stitchpunks only live for a couple of years each at the most.
9 takes place in a German-occupied European country rather than Germany itself.
In that timeline, one of the differences made to the Industrial Revolution (that the Industrial Revolution was different and more stuff happened is confirmed by Word Of God) is that German engineering became awesome much earlier and in a big way. Alt-WWI or a different large war may have resulted in Germany gaining control over neighboring areas (such as the Austro-Hungarian region) and other European powers (such as France and parts or all of Great Britain), or even as a result of a techno-cultural revolution such as how English is the de facto international language today. Thus, one may see a sign reading "Vorsicht" in London, or travel down Champselyseeßtraße.
The "microbes" seen in the rain that falls from the souls of the stitchpunks are actually midichlorians.
The Scientist is a Time Lord.
He has a title, being simply referred to as The Scientist, and every Time Lord has a title, such as The Doctor. Each of the stitchpunks are parts of his soul, therefore his different lives. And the Source is his sonic-screwdriver!... or something.
The Source talisman is actually a magical artifact from the Middle Ages, or even earlier.
Think about it - in that book the stitchpunks found, which must have been pretty old due to it being written in Latin, it had the exact same symbols that are on the Source. And alchemy was popular in the Middle Ages. Now for the theory about it being magic - 9 didn't wake up for about 50 years, right? You'd think that the Source talisman would have dust on it when 9 found it, after being untouched for all that time. But nope, when 9 finds it it's still all shiny and new-looking.
9 and WALL-E take place in the same universe, a few centuries apart.
Aside from the fact that 9 is animated mostly in drab colors and Wall-E is in Pixar technocolor, the situation on Earth in these two films looks very similar.
1 was trying to set fire to the factory too soon to deliberately kill 9 and 7.
Of course if they waited too long, they'd all likely get busted, depending. But hey, the only two rebelling against him are in there. Why not just get rid of both before 7 runs off again or 9 makes another big mistake.
Each stitchpunk is one of the points on The Enneagram.
According to the system, in general...
9 is a grown-up Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet.
This article by Majiesto on ps3attitude.com explains similarities between 9 and LBP that go deeper than the skin and the zipper. "Throughout the film, the stitchpunks are hounded by a cat-like beast with a skull for a head, a skull that looks very similar to that of Skulldozer from the Wedding level. [...] If you watch the trailer [of 9] closely, you can see bits and pieces of what we would call platforming. You’ll see 9 duck, jump, and scurry over moving conveyor belts all the while machinery is crashing down upon him. [...] The stitchpunks are creative little creatures, using whatever stuff they have lying around to create inventions, weapons, and entire simple machines. They can turn nothing into something, just as we do with 'My Moon.'"
The world was only mostly dead.
Waterbears. Those things are pretty freaking hard to kill. Sure, there were the microorganisms in the rain at the end, but bacteria are also hard to kill. If you can drop off a waterbear in subzero climates and it can just wait, why is some gas gonna stop them? And the world will someday be ruled by giant, sentient waterbears.
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