Sounds like the perfect bit of animation to watch with the sound muted and some great music playing instead. What musical choice would be yours Mr. Constant?

A very strong, and enjoyable, review for a weak film. Great job!

George Lucas explicitly used Joseph Campbell's work as a guide for pretty much everything in Start Wars, which was conceived and written some time from 1971 to 1973 released in 1976. But none of this caught on until the mid 80s?

Then again, if by "invaluable" you mean that Campbell's ideas are anything like "correct" then wouldn't you have to believe that the narrative structures he describes have been present since the dawn of storytelling, and certainly since the dawn of film?

But maybe Campbell did only catch on in the 80s. So then before that time, coming of age movies from Hollywood were not bursting with cliches? Huh. I did not know that.

Also. Is it a kid's movie if it's rated PG-13? Isn't that actually a teenager's movie? It doesn't seem courageous to me to have dead bodies in a teenager's movie but maybe the cynical assumption is that parents bring 7 year olds to PG-13 movies not expecting dead bodies and then Pow! A courageous challenge is thrown down by the film. I don't know; that's pretty cynical even for me.

great.
vapid.
good choice of mind stretching dialog.

personally, I thought you had more in it than enter the dragons care.

you'll find the heavy weight "bear claw in the window".

I guess I shouldn't be grudge the street smarts... or the sats com line.

just be ready for the biblical introduction to fractal imagery and mind sweepers from BONN.

Not only did George Lucas use Campbell's work (Constant's description reads like a precis of Star Wars), so did George Miller in the Mad Max series.
But Constant's comments on studio drones suggest that his knowledge of the business derives from the caricatures drawn from - where else? - the movies. You'll find a number of studio executives who graduated from schools like Harvard, Brown, and Wesleyan. Now, that education may not have transformed them into great artists or financial wizards, but it certainly exposed them to Joseph Campbell.

"you can do some serious damage with it." please explain how any animated movie, or any movie can do any REAL and or SERIOUS damage.

Its Entertainment, not even an art film, and therefore not real, or serious. Ridiculous over-exaggeration from the reviewer here.

You loose all credibility as a critic when you make sweeping over dramatic statements such as these.

@7: You "loose" all credibility as a commentator when you spell 'lose' like a 1st grader :p

saw the short film of this like 3-4 years back. it was incredible.

I lost all interest in this movie when the little promo cards they were handing out at comicon introduced 7 as "the girl." I don't require that every movie I watch pass the Bechdel test or anything, but can we at least move past "the [only] girl" as a character archetype, please?

I have to say, the previews and even the lukewarm reviews seem to promise a perfectly fine (that is to say, considerably better than average) get-baked-and-see-a-matinee sort of experience, which is pretty much all I'd have expected.

@7: This is a movie review, so wouldn't it logically make sense to mean "serious damage to cinema"?

Maybe instead of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you could try reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Shocking, I'm sure. While the movies were visually stunning, they never really captured Tolkien's magic.

The criticisms are all very valid, but I really enjoyed the animation. As @1 said, best to get the story from the visuals.
If you're an animation geek, I think you'll like it. I would go see it again.

I think there was a better movie hiding inside 9. One where the character has to make a bigger choice, where the sacrifice of the curmudgeon-who-comes-to-know-better is revealed as meaningless, where the action character (7) is shown to be the idiot and the idiot (6) is shown to be the hero, and where, ultimately, the hero's final choices look horrific on the surface but reveal "the source's" intentions to be good and valuable.

But that movie wouldn't have sold.

@11: I made it half way through Two Towers before I drifted off. Liked the movies better.

@7: If you're sitting in a movie theatre watching a movie, you remember it later, you talk to other people about it, how is it not "real"?

@16: I'm with you. I've always thought Tolkien was a marvelous world-builder, but that was clearly where his passion was. His actual writing tends to be rather lifeless and disappointing.