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Monday, November 24, 2008
Give a dog a boost - see Bolt, Disney’s best in years
Amid all the excitement about Twilight this past weekend, Disney’s new movie Bolt got a bit lost in the shuffle, and that’s …
Well, I was going to say it was a shame, but I won’t because I fully believe this marvelous movie will catch on. Not only is it lots of fun, It’s the best animated movie Disney has made in many years.
(I will, however, scold audiences for giving more money to Beverly Hills Chihuahua in its first weekend. Shame on you, American moviegoing public! SHAME ON YOU!)
All righteous indignation aside, however, I can kind of understand why Bolt didn’t have so much voltage. Disney’s animated movies stopped being events sometime around the millennium change. People lost faith in the brand.
From the late 80s through the late 90s, Disney cranked out one great movie after another almost every year. Then, the Mouse House got caught in a trap. Hampered by poor management decisions and a loss of storytelling savvy, Disney’s movies became less and less magical. I could find good things to say about every movie Disney has made in the past decade, but I wanted to find great things to say. Since 1999, only Lilo & Stitch and the grossly underrated Treasure Planet counted as near-great films.
Now, however, Pixar genius John Lasseter is nursing Disney back to health by focusing attention back to where it belongs: the story and characters. And Bolt gets high marks for both.
The story is basically a cross between The Truman Show and Toy Story. Bolt (John Travolta) is a pooch who stars in a hit TV series about a dog with super powers. The only thing is, Bolt thinks it’s all real.
So when Bolt accidentally gets shipped to New York, he’s convinced his owner and co-star Penny (Miley Cyrus) is in mortal danger - but he can’t figure out why his powers have deserted him. To help him, he recruits a smart-aleck cat, Mittens (Susie Essman) and an excitable hamster named Rhino (Mark Walton), who spends most of his time in a plastic ball.
The premise doesn’t stand up to scrutiny if you think about it too hard, and I could have done without Penny’s smarmy and unfunny agent, who sucks the life out of the film whenever he’s around.
However, those are my only significant misgivings about Bolt. Everything else works and works very well indeed. The picture sports an abundance of riotous sight gags, especially in the vibrant action scenes, viewed to best effect in 3D. And even better, the characters tug at the heartstrings and pull up the corners of the mouth.
The voice talent (yes, including Ms. Cyrus) is top-notch. Especially winning is Walton, a story artist who did such a great job with the voice in test runs that Disney decided to keep him - a trick Pixar has used on more than one occasion (e.g. the late Joe Ranft voicing Heimlich in a bug’s life, or director Andrew Stanton voicing Crush in Finding Nemo, which gets name-checked in Bolt). Rhino is a terrific sidekick who steals scenes left and right. Brace yourselves, pet stores: Hamster sales will shoot through the roof after this movie.
Even more importantly, I cared a lot about these characters and was genuinely moved in a way I haven’t been at a Disney movie in far too long. Under Lasseter’s guidance, the Mouse House is making strides in the right direction again. They’re not quite up to where they were in the early 90s, but Bolt fully convinced me Disney could be great again. And that bodes very well for their return to hand-drawn animation, The Princess and the Frog, due a year from now.
Maybe Disney’s not back at happily ever after yet, but with Bolt, I think it’s at a very happy to be continued …
GRADE: A-
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