One of the worst days in Hollywood’s history was when some
studio-executive drone accidentally wandered into a library and
discovered the works of Joseph Campbell. This exec, whose name is
forever lost in the mists of history, must’ve screwed his two brain
cells together, figured out how to open the book, and tried to make
sense of the black blotches on the pages. Campbell’s work is invaluable
if you’re a serious student of history or communication—but if
you’re an idiot, you can do some serious damage with it.
Since that dark day, which by my estimation was sometime in the
mid-1980s, Holly-
wood’s screenwriters have treated every adventure
screenplay even slightly intended for young adults or children like a
Mad Libs cribbed from Campbell’s explorations into the archetypes of
fiction and myth:
Every adventure story must include a brave young
man on a quest to stop an impossibly malevolent evil, an imbecilic
sidekick who eventually proves his bravery, a woman who kicks ass but
for some reason can’t be the hero of the story, a wise old man who will
confront death, and the cringing turncoat who needs to learn a lesson
in humility. 9 is the latest in this long parade of cinematic
clichés.
Which is not to say that it’s not gorgeous. It’s an exceptionally
well-designed foray into computer animation, even for the age of Pixar.
The title character (voiced by Elijah Wood, phoning in the exact same
performance he gave in The Lord of the Rings) is a rag
doll constructed from burlap and animated by some mixture of science
and alchemy in a
postapocalyptic future. He meets other golems who
appear to be sewn together, just like him, and together they join
forces to destroy their enemies, a team of patchwork creatures strung
together from the detritus of a crushed civilization. Together, they
will restore life to the world against—yawn!—all odds.
The voice work here is as generic as the Campbellian archetypes:
John C. Reilly plays 5, the aforementioned doofus-with-heart-of-gold,
and Crispin Glover slobbers all over 6, an eccentric artist who can see
the future in a way that saner souls can’t. There’s no character
development here because there are no characters.
As for plot: There is a scene where a fierce warrior in an enormous
helmet defeats a formidable opponent and then takes off the helmet to
be revealed as—GASP!—a girl?! The bad guy’s eyes
glow bright red (seriously, wouldn’t chartreuse or pure white make a
nice change? Does even your eye color have to be a brick-throwingly
obvious cue for the morons who aren’t paying attention to the movie?).
The good guys give nonthreatening, vague lectures about the dangers of
technology and the horrors of war and then do everything but turn and
stare at the audience sternly while tapping their feet. I could go
on.
The generic plot wouldn’t be such a crime if the movie didn’t have a
spark of originality and daring hidden deep inside. One too-rare
example: 9 is refreshingly unafraid, for a kid’s movie, to deal
with death—there are two human corpses on display in the movie,
including one of a small child, and characters use the skeletons of
dead animals (birds and cats, mostly) for protection and decoration.
And the design, again, is something other filmmakers will be ripping
off for years to come (I still can’t stop thinking about 9’s
camera-shutter eyes, which surpass even Wall•E for actorly
expressiveness in an inanimate object).
But this pretty, junky grandeur is a vehicle for such painful
vapidness, it makes 9 feel, somehow, even less original.
One can imagine little protogoths rushing breathlessly out of the
megaplex after watching 9 (it’s not a cliché if you’re
encountering it for the first time, after all) and running across the
mall to Hot Topic, where an entire wardrobe’s worth of T-shirts and
hoodies featuring all the characters from the film will no doubt be
available for the little darklings to buy and wear to school. Executive
producer Tim Burton has been down this lucrative merchandising road
before with The Nightmare Before Christmas, but at least that
film felt like something new. 9 is a heartless “epic adventure”
for people who are too dumb and impatient to watch the Lord of the
Rings trilogy. 
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.
Realistically parents are going to be bringing their young kids to it just because it’s a “cartoon,” regardless of the actual rating of the film.
I saw kids barely older than toddler age at the last couple Batman movies, and you can bet that those parents thought “hey, Batman, it’s a comic book so it’s for kids,” too.
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.
@5. Yep, Campbell is required reading for all grad students seeking their MBAs at the best universities. G.W.Bush was fond of quoting from “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” during policy meetings at the White House.
“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.