Disney animation takes a tentative step out of the shadows of Pixar with “Bolt,” a winning 3D-animated action-comedy that marries the best Disney traditions with Pixar polish. Though this road comedy of a lost TV star dog doesn’t rival the classics from Disney’s computer-animation pioneer partners, it’s the first in-house Disney animation — after the middling “Chicken Little,” “The Wild” and “Meet the Robinsons” — to bear comparison to the Pixar gold standard.
In a dazzling 10-minute opening, we’re treated to a sort of “Bolt Supremacy,” the adventures of a teenage girl and her “genetically altered” superdog, a canine capable of leaping over black helicopters in a single bound, blowing up objects with his glower and flattening armies with his “super bark.” Whenever Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus) is in danger, Bolt is there to save her.
But Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) isn’t in on the gag. The effects go off around him and he thinks he did it. The bars on a prison cell bend, because they’re rubber, and he doesn’t know. It’s all to preserve Bolt’s delusional sense of urgency, the show’s director (James Lipton of “Inside the Actors Studio”) insists.
So Bolt is particularly ill- suited to be on his own. When he’s accidentally shipped to New York, he has to make his way back to Hollywood and Penny using not his vaunted superpowers but his wit, his slow realization that he’s not the dog he always thought he was.
“Normally, I’m a tad more indestructible,” he complains to the cat he kidnaps because he thinks cats are part of a vast feline conspiracy controlled by “the green-eyed man,” the TV show’s villain.
Mittens (Susie Essman) has the thankless job of bringing the super dog back to Earth.
The 3D animation here is less gimmicky than is usual for movies that you have to watch through the funny glasses. It just makes the images sharper.
It’s a cartoon that goes to great pains to mimic and mock real dog behavior, much of which Mittens has to teach Bolt, who’s never had to beg with those puppy-dog eyes.
It’s about a girl who loves her dog and the dog who loves her back.
And that heart makes “Bolt” the best Disney cartoon to not have the Pixar name on it since “Lilo & Stitch.”
“Bolt”
PG for epic battle action and violence. 1 hour, 35 minutes. Directed by Chris Williams and Byron Howard; written by Dan Fogelman and Williams; starring the voice talents of John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Susie Essman, Mark Walton, Malcolm McDowell, James Lipton, Greg Germann and Chlöe Maretz. Opens today at area theaters.
