'Bolt': The animal kingdom brings its best in animated tale
What an age for animated film we live in. And what a year for it this has been. Over the summer we had “WALL-E”— Pixar’s masterpiece — and now we’ve got “Bolt,” which may well contain the most complex story I’ve ever seen in a kids movie but which didn’t phase the little ones at the promotional screening one bit — and it sure didn’t stop their adorable little laughter or gasps at the scary stuff.
They seemed to love it. In the immortal words of Smokey Robinson, I second that emotion.
Bolt
Three and a half stars
STARRING: The voices of John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Susie Essman, Greg Germann and Mark Walton.
DIRECTOR: Byron Howard and Chris Williams
RUNNING TIME: 84 minutes RATING: PG
THE LOWDOWN: A new kind of girl and her dog movie about a plucky little TV adventure heroine and the adorable, ever-loving dog who thinks his superpowers are real.
Essentially, it’s just a Girl And Her Dog movie — a perfect little fuzzball fantasy to tide the Obama girls over while their family decides on the hypoallergenic pooch to take with them to their new digs on Pennsylvania Avenue. You’ll love all the animals to pieces (and while you’re at it, look at the mind-boggling realism of computer-animated breezes through dog fur or the way sweet little puppy paws slip and slide over the tile counters of a pet store). You’re also getting a sentimental adventure movie about a TV show animal who has been carefully deluded by his studio into thinking his superpowers are real. (And if you guess that at the end the power of love conquers all, you’ve just given yourself one of the best reasons to take the whole family.)
It’s complex. When we first see Penny and her little dog Bolt, she’s a little tyke in the pet store who takes a look at a puppy’s snow white fur and bright, wide, eager eyes and falls head over heels in love with him, slobberings and all.
Flash five years forward. Her scientist Dad has been kidnapped, but he tells Penny not to worry because he has given Bolt superpowers to protect her. Sure enough, the dog’s superbark is enough to bring down a flotilla of marauding helicopters.
But then, wham, the movie turns on a dime and we learn it was all a TV show. But there’s one hitch: The little dog full of bravado thinks it’s real. (Think canine “Truman Show” for kids.) And yes, the very real (fictional) little dog Bolt would go to the ends of the earth just to rejoin his little mistress Penny.
Which he just about has to do before the movie is over. The dog’s companions on a cross-country jaunt are a scrawny, imperious, cynical alley cat named Mittens and a fat, fantasizing hamster in an exercise ball named Rhino.
When we first encounter Mittens, she seems like the worst of the animal kingdom as conceived by Disney — a kind of vicious little shakedown artist who demands that all the neighborhood pigeons pay tribute to her and bring her food, lest she turn them all into nothing but fuss and feathers.
The Pigeons — no fools they — befriend in a hurry the heroically deluded dog with the lightning bolt on his side.
Pigeons, by the way, provide a kind of rollicking Greek chorus in this thing. They’re the plot glue to get you from one part of the story to another. When, in one Hollywood scene, some screenwriting pigeons make a pitch to star dog Bolt, I roared. At that moment, all the complex showbiz metajokes that the great cartoon geniuses at “Termite Terrace” used to stuff into 7z minute “Looney Tunes” starring Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for Warner Brothers had been updated perfectly for a new cartoon age.
And boy is that ever not all.
The voice cast here is zesty and first-rate: John Travolta as sweet, befuddled Bolt; comedian Susie Essman as the love-and food-starved alley cat Mittens; Mark Walton as crazy hamster Rhino; and, yes, Miley Cyrus as Penny.
And that’s where this tale within a tale within a tale gets especially cool.
Here, in the leading voice role of “Bolt,” you’ve got Disney’s No. 1 human property — the actress who plays Hannah Montana — in a cartoon that’s all about the perils of movie studios treating loving people and their devoted pets as property and nothing else.
The moral of the story? The creative types (like animation supervisor John Lasseter) and working stiffs at Disney are no more in love with corporate Disney than anyone else is. In any and all star/studio disputes, they’d likely be on Miley’s side.
And, by the way, Miley the actress is often a little overmuch, but she makes a great cartoon voice and for a very simple reason: She may just be a teen kid but, like Judy Garland a few generations ago, the minute she opens her mouth, she has the powerhouse larynx of a star.
