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. 
