Lost Super-Puppy, Answers to the Name of Bolt. If Found, Please Contact The Incredibles...

Rating: 8/10 (12 February 2009)

I've read that Bolt is the first computer animated feature to come from Disney Studios since Pixar's John Lasseter took control of it, and it's easy to see the Pixar presence in the movie. John Travolta and Miley Cyrus provide the celebrity voice talent for the movie, about a dog who stars in a superhero TV show but who is just as unaware that he's an actor as he is that he's a dog.
Remember at the end of A Bug's Life when they animated together some outtakes where shots from the movie were messed up because of various mishaps on set? I thought that was one of the most charming ideas in an already fun and entertaining movie, and in Bolt they have taken that and centered an entire movie around it. Bolt and Penny are a team battling the evil green-eyed man, who has kidnapped Penny's father and are attempting to extract information out of him.
Between shooting sessions, Bolt lives in a trailer, unaware that Penny is going home to her real life and that the world returns to normal when he's not around. He believes that he is exercising extraordinary restraint in not using his superpowers to teach a lesson to a couple of wise-cracking alley-cats who tease him through the roof vent of his trailer at night.
Through a series of unfortunate events initiated by an encounter with the cats, Bolt finds himself accidentally shipped in a box to the east coast, from where he must travel across America in the real world in his quest to become reunited with Penny.
In watching a movie about a cute superhero who suddenly finds himself in the real world and must gradually accept the heartbreaking news that there's nothing special about him, it's impossible not to think of Buzz Lightyear, who suffered through exactly the same situation in Toy Story almost 15 years ago, but even though this seems to point to a disappointing characterization weakness in the movie, it is the characters who are the most interesting.
There is nothing particularly fresh or interesting about Penny, who is really nothing more than a catalyst to drive Bolt's adventure, and even Bolt himself is giving us a predictable performance of a dog who thinks he has superpowers, but the characters that he meets along the way are the best things about the movie.
He encounters a hardened alley-cat in New York named Mittens who has been bullying pigeons into making regular food donations to her (a clear homage to the bullying grasshoppers in A Bug's Life). She and Bolt become tied together with a leash and he forces her to help him get to California. But it's the even smaller characters that are the most interesting and charming. The Italian-American pigeons that Bolt meets in New York, who just know that they know his face from somewhere but can't quite place it, are incredibly well-animated and cleverly voiced.
But my favorite is Rhino, a superfan of Bolt's TV show whom Bolt and Mittens meet in a trailer park on their way to the west coast. Rhino will be a popular favorite character from the movie. He's overcome with excitement at meeting his hero, and it provides a unique comedic situation when both he and Bolt think that Bolt has super-powers, while Mittens must pacify them in order to get what she wants. She has been dragged scratching and screaming into this situation, and her disbelief at her miserable luck provides a good portion of the movie's comedy.
The family content of the movie plays up the ongoing cats and dogs rivalry that I don't remember seeing this directly portrayed since the relatively disappointing 2001 film Cats & Dogs. In one of the movie's more amusing sequences, Mittens teaches how to beg, and he successfully gets one trailer park family after another to offer food to his puppy-dog begging skills. When Mittens tries it, she gets a frying pan flung at her.
The movie knows how to work the comedy of a computer animated feature, which is why it was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar and is also why it's a lot of fun, but beneath the clever screen-writing and occasionally amazing animation, the standard-issue cartoon-messages of never abandoning a friend in need make the rest of the movie pretty un-spectacular.
Bolt deserves to be nominated as one of the best animated features of 2008, but it also deserves to come in behind Kung Fu Panda, the second best animated feature of the year, and WALL-E, which will win.