Fine Family Film about Plucky Pooch

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2009)

New Disney animated film that reportedly went through some development problems early in its production finally appears as a kind of unofficial semi-sequel to 2004's THE INCREDIBLES (had that film also included a family superdog), about a young White German Shepherd named Bolt (John Travolta, strongly used during the first hour or so but whose voice largely disappears during the last 20-30 minutes), employed along with his young owner Penny (the ear-popping Miley Cyrus) in the production of outlandish adventures for an unnamed studios' output of media and theme park attractions. When awakened to his contradictory usages by several of the other animal actors at the studio, the little pup goes off on his own by unexpectedly getting shipped to the East Coast and forgotten by everyone except Penny and her mother. Joined by an amusingly smart-mouthed alleycat named Mittens (Susie Essman, whose voicework skillfully displays comic skepticism without becoming one-note or overly hostile) and an overfed TV addicted Ohio hamster named Rhino (Mark Walton), Bolt decides to make his way back home somehow and prove to Penny and the audience that his life matters to what they have asked of him. Slightly longer-than-normal film of its type at first uses the additional material with seemingly traditional cartoon-movie reinforcements like a song midpoint (albeit good) or the moral that money can only exist to ultimately feed business kingdoms and royalty so don't make it do anything else. But alongside these genre tropes directors Byron Howard and Chris Williams inject energizing and inventive elements, particularly through the dedicated verbal character interplay of Bolt and his bizarre animal contacts (including blankly-eyed head-bobbing pigeons and dialog-feeding actor felines), or their encounters with a wide range of human physical types who come off more realistically American proletarian lower-class lifelike than most animated features usually include. In fact much of the film's comedy, starting with Bolt's own unintended myopia during the first half, is so low-key in funnily suspenseful scene transitions and delayed verbal punch lines that the standard animated movie audience may be taken somewhat aback if expecting constantly bawdy SHREK-like pop-media satire or romantically-/matrimonially-angled narrative sideroads (the Disney cartoon epics of the 1990s and 2000s). Like its little hero BOLT instead constantly keeps its head low and quite honest and is all the fresher for it as the little trio charmingly continues through the American Mid- and South-west and Bolt himself steadily learning his own sadness & disappointment can be offset and made palatable as he learns the value of real friendship and a sensible life goal of his own might see him through. Another successful element is the remarkable range of moods and settings the animators create by juggling sunsets, twilights, and light intrusions in shadowy cramped spaces (much of Act II takes place after dark and I was marveling at how the directors and their visual crew were keeping very strong pace through the lower-key nighttime lighting and compositions with the storytelling; when the action literally explodes at an all-night Ohio animal shelter [!] the resulting screams and chaos come off much funnier like a group of real animals and people were all just woken up and startled into disastrous realizations at the same time right at 3am). It all grandly combines near the end when little Bolt returns to LA just as the mourning Penny is involved with the climactic staging of a dangerous epic fire stunt that suddenly goes awry, and joined by his new friends along with the overtaken firefighters descends into the maelstrom to rescue his beloved owner for real and prove to himself and his audience what he's really made of. Its story elements a little creaky, its voice & star-speeching maybe a little too cut off before the final minutes, BOLT does finally combine its' modest strengths together into a rousing ending in the finest Disney way that bodes well for its new Pixar management and the imaginations of children who will find a little canine hero that they can learn from.