Movie Review: Bolt

 

The Disney animated blockbuster-to-be Bolt is a delightful family movie, and if I’d seen it as a kid I would have been deeply traumatized. Back then, kid flicks weren’t meta; they didn’t riff on the discontinuity between real life and the artificial universe of TV and movies. They were plain-old fairy tales, parables of self-reliance. Bolt opens with a little girl, Penny, choosing an adorable doggy at a pet shop. Then it jumps to the next, fantastical level: It’s five years later, Penny’s scientist father is in the clutches of a megalomaniac, and Bolt is equipped with superpowers to protect his daughter. Cue a rollicking chase and the pulverization of bad guys. Just as we’ve absorbed all this, we’re on to level three. We’ve been watching the filming of a TV show, except (and here’s the final level) Bolt has been kept in a state of ignorance. He does not know he’s not a super-dog and that Penny is never in peril. Yes, this is The Truman Show with talking animals.

Bolt finally settles into an old-fashioned tale of a hero and his sidekicks—here, an emaciated, mouthy female alley cat and an obese, celebrity-worshipping hamster in a clear-plastic exercise ball—on a cross-country journey, with a climax that would comfortably fit into Lassie. But the central question is up to the minute: Will Bolt find out he’s an ordinary (talking) dog and survive that knowledge and discover his essential dogginess? It’s a fascinating trend: state-of-the-art Hollywood fantasies pegged to the notion that state-of-the-art Hollywood fantasies are our chief impediment to being “real.”

As Bolt, John Travolta is inspired: His voice still cracks like an adolescent’s, and he has the perfect dopey innocence. Susie Essman gives the cat’s reflexive bitchiness some depth (she’s a hurtin’ hellion), and I have to admit that until I heard Miley Cyrus’s Penny, I underestimated the throaty expressiveness of her voice. Mark Walton (an actual cartoon-voice guy and not a marquee name!) makes the fat hamster (who might have been an irritant) sing. In theaters equipped to show the film in 3-D, your tickets come with glasses, through which the animals look even more huggable.

Bolt impresses on more levels than just the basic — and in our wised-up, self-reflexive pop culture universe, audiences are primed to play along with the movie’s sophisticated meta references to Hollywood culture, New York culture, TV culture, and even doggy culture: Look! It’s a joke about Finding Nemo, about Hollywood agents, about pitching screenplay ideas! (The bright script is by Dan Fogelman and Chris Williams, the sleek direction by Disney pros Williams and Byron Howard.) In our 21st-century familiarity with the results, we don’t give the intricate technobeauty of digital 3-D animation a second thought, taking for granted the subtleties of dimension, perspective, texture, and motion that can be achieved (with the right computer programs); on a regular old night at the movies, we don’t blink twice at seeing the most gorgeous visual shifts and adjustments, delicate and thoughtful as an old master’s brushstrokes. There’s a stunning throwaway moment when Rhino the hamster rolls in his stupid plastic ball in front of his new compatriots, and the faces of dog and cat, seen through the plastic, are distorted as they would be in real life — yet we pay no attention to the army of animation artists marshaled just for that one passing sequence.

Bolt breaks no great new stylistic ground — and yet it’s a sturdy beaut. The cartoon chase scenes are of secondary importance — and yet they’re wittier and more exciting than anything in Quantum of Solace. It’s a great day in America when the complicated looks so easy, and when we expect smart storytelling as a rule, not the exception.

Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy

MPAA Rating: PG

Movie Trailer

Movie Website: Disney.com/Bolt

Actors/Actresses: John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Susie Essman, Mark Walton

Our Verdict:

A witty and fun family movie. Be sure to catch it in 3-D at the theaters.