BOLT
2008
Directed by Chris Williams and Byron Howard
Written by Dan Fogelman and Chris Williams
The 00s were, taken as a whole, one of the big valleys in the peaks-and-valleys history of Disney animation, the first decade that they faced genuine and sustained competition, and their reaction to that competition—the turn towards fully-rendered CGI animation which the downslide of their "traditional" 2-D cartoons had occasioned—saw them reaching nadirs that had not been previously contemplated since the 80s. This did not completely turn around till 2010's Tangled, and there's an argument that the greater Disney company did not perceive a full recovery for the Walt Disney Animation Studios until as late as 2013's megahit Frozen, the lessons of its success being seen as the most valuable ones and, therefore, perhaps sufficing to explain why the late 10s and all of the 20s so far for WDAS have been an apocalyptic wasteland that reeks of death. But if there ever was such a thing as a Second Disney Renaissance (not that we would need to accord it the same level of industry-redefining and even art form-rescuing greatness as the first), then I would eagerly encourage you to backdate that Second Renaissance by a couple of years to 2008 and Bolt.
The 00s, you'll recall, had previously had just one unimpeachable hit, and this was Lilo & Stitch; immediately after it made waves in the summer of 2002, one of its directors (and its prime mover and Stitch's creator), Chris Sanders, started on his next film for Disney, which by 2002 was always going to be CGI, concerning a dog who worked as an animal actor in Hollywood getting himself lost in rural America and, alongside some new animal companions, learning how the real world works. It'd be leaving some really important details out, but this could be a summary of Bolt. It's not, of course: it's a summary of American Dog, an abandoned film so different from Bolt that Sanders, with an admirable generosity of spirit, has never had a problem with Bolt's existence even if he obviously had a big problem with American Dog's non-existence; for it is the fact of the matter that Bolt, that I would suggest was the thing that inaugurated the process of saving Disney animation, was built on the ashes of the next film from the guy whose previous work had been Disney animation's only source of cultural resonance in almost a decade, and it caused Sanders to walk away from Disney and never return, except to continue providing the voice of Stitch, including for the impending live-action remake, which I would not describe as admirable, necessarily, but I'm sure he was amply compensated. (It bears mentioning that Sanders's 2020 film, The Call of the Wild, was produced at 20th Century Fox when they were still 20th Century Fox.) Maybe you could even hold faith that this all happened for a reason, given that Sanders and Lilo & Stitch's other director, Dean DeBlois, reteamed at DreamWorks to do another cross-species friendship cartoon,* How To Train Your Dragon. The results of that are not only legendary in their own right, but planted the seeds of DWA's own renaissance.
In hindsight, and obviously through my own lens, I don't see any reason to believe that American Dog would be better than Bolt, or even particularly good; that new WDAS chief creative officer John Lasseter didn't think so isn't dispositive, and some of his dictates to Sanders do sound pretty asinine, especially his objection to American Dog being set in the American Southwest just because Lasseter's Pixar film, Cars, had been set in the American Southwest, but in Lasseter's defense, the film marketplace has never been able to support multiple movies across multiple years being set in the American Southwest, that's just a Hollywood truism and basic business analysis. It's rumored, likewise, that Lasseter hadn't really loved Lilo & Stitch, and I can't really gainsay that, since in its messiness I don't love Lilo & Stitch myself; but American Dog sounds suspiciously like Sanders's original concept for his Stitch film, which a previous executive already had to meddle with, and had involved the alien landing in the American Midwest and—well—alongside some new animal companions, learning how the real world works. We've since seen him finally achieve something akin to that scenario with The Wild Robot, though maybe American Dog wouldn't have had to end with an idiotic giant laser battle. But then, American Dog reportedly had some real anything-goes zaniness—phrases like "a radioactive, cookie-selling Girl Scout zombie serial killer" arise in Disney executives' post facto descriptions of it—and I hope I can be forgiven for not being able to imagine how that would work, and mistrustful that Sanders (especially without DeBlois) would have made it work.
Though I could just be biased because of how much I appreciate the Bolt we got in its place, so if we're talking in terms of any Second Disney Renaissance—at least we're no longer talking in terms of ruin!—then it's with Bolt that we discover one of its key figures, maybe even its unsung hero. This was Byron Howard, whom we've previously had cause only to glancingly mention as a supervising animator on 2-D films (he was also a story artist on Chicken Little), the senior co-director here but only barely to Chris Williams, and the thing is that Byron's name is the connecting thread between almost everything during our putative "Second Disney Renaissance" that justifies the appellation, with the exception of the movies directed by those old masters, Ron Clements and John Musker, whose veins, I guess, just thrum with "renaissance" energy regardless. It's kind of remarkable that Howard and Williams were able to hit their target so well, especially as debuting directors: by the time Lasseter had fully shut Sanders down, it was only eighteen months till the newly-retitled Bolt's November 2008 release date and that commitment was bound to be honored. Rushed, restarted production had not worked out well at all for Meet the Robinsons, and this was an even more complete ground-up rebuild; somehow, even at this punishing pace, they not only made a good cartoon, but a good-looking one, the first Disney CGI cartoon that looked like they had figured out how to make such things. As for being just "a good cartoon," it probably helped that—and I guess we can discern from this how much influence Lasseter was exerting—Bolt's essential building blocks had already been established to have worked all the way back in Pixar's Toy Story in 1995, with its own delusional deuteragonist. But those are good building blocks; and if it also opens with a gambit noticeably similar to Toy Story 2's, I'd call Bolt's "inestimably cleverer" and even "intoxicatingly De Palmian," though clearly one's mileage may vary on either count.
So that kicks off with the adoption of a widdle white Swiss shepherd puppy by a certain Penny (Chloe Grace Moretz for these few seconds; Miley Cyrus thereafter), whom she dubs Bolt (John Travolta when speaking to other animals); some few years later, Bolt has been drafted into Penny's scientist father's (Sean Donellan's) ongoing conflict against the evil Doctor Calico (Malcolm McDowell) and his worldwide army of sinister human agents and even more sinister cats, serving as Penny's bodyguard with the advantage of the superpowers Penny's dad has given him—strength, speed, heat vision, and a bark as powerful as an explosive, so that he's basically Krypto, except he can't fly (I believe the verbatim quote is, "that would be silly"). Bolt has cause to demonstrate all these powers against Calico's minions in an astonishingly, perhaps even ridiculously kinetic action sequence—I'll circle back to how casually edgy this movie can be, but it's fairly obvious Bolt is indifferent to all human life besides Penny's—and, naturally, Bolt saves the day, because that's how every episode of his action-adventure television show, also called Bolt, ends. What Bolt doesn't know, and we've only just found out, is that this is only a television show.
This is, I'm afraid, the barrier to entry here, and I'm not sure I know a single person for whom it has failed to be a substantial obstacle—I get the impression it's the primary reason Bolt rates lower on most people's Disney lists than I'd prefer it to—but, hell, I adore this opening. That does not mean it's not Goddamn belligerently stupid: as will be explained by the show's megalomaniacal director (a gloriously pretentious James Lipton, for other than Cyrus, who winds up with a tertiary character anyway, we can at least agree that for a cartoon this full of celebrity voices, these are some extraordinarily good and deliberate casting decisions), the show's success depends utterly on the dog actor believing that what he's experiencing is real. I'm sure it's not necessary to keep describing how insane Bolt is, given that its plot jumps off from "what if The Truman Show, but with a dog?" It is, however, fun, so let's just get all of it out there: so, okay, that entire action sequence ranging across an entire city was done in real space, in real time, on miles of streets, shut down for the occasion, with dozens of sci-fi attack helicopters and perhaps hundreds of cameras, and with largely practical effects? does this show cost $200 million per episode? wait, are you telling me that that was a soundstage? and did they hire Penny first, and then they discovered she owned the uniquely-talented Bolt, or was she only dragged in because this once-in-a-generation canine actor could not work without her? did Bolt not notice the immense shift in his environment, or that Penny has only a father now and not only a mom (Grey DeLisle)? does it further make sense to separate Bolt from Penny after every shoot? and, indeed, in what universe would a dog superhero show that's manifestly for small babies, and is explicitly patterned on Inspector Gadget, have been a fraction as popular as this film continually insists this show must be? (The last one is slightly finessed with a later scene that, by dint of placing Bolt-the-show alongside The A-Team and Press Your Luck, half-suggests that this is set in the 80s, where I suppose its success would be a molecule or two more credible.)
And even so, I do love it: it's flabbergasting in the nerviest way I've ever seen such a sequence be, effectively a parody of cinema's hundreds of other "show-within-a-show" openings that are not, in truth, much more believable—"oh, look, it's a several-minute stunt-heavy sequence across multiple locations, assembled out of pure coverage, sure it is" (the first serious intimation that it is a show-within-a-show is when it ends lingering on a henchman/stuntman miraculously still breathing after Bolt's evidently full-on destroyed him). It's just that the usual version of this scene doesn't tend to rub your face in their disconnection from real filmmaking as unbelievably hard as this one does, because this one can take advantage of the infinite possibilities of animation and the further possibilities of three-dimensional staging in CGI (it is, frankly, a cool scene on its merits as a work of layout and action cartoon elaboration, even if the effects animation has aged), and it's already hinting at its own unreality in smart, subtle ways as soon as it starts, in its 00s blockbuster complexion. When we return to the show a little later, it's even more visually forceful, deploying as parody the ugly greenish color grading of the kind of contemporary-and-gritty action-procedural trying hard to be hip and with-it.
It's also incredibly cruel, so much so that the featured cat extras have a game of mocking our hero's delusions, and the cruelty is a huge undercurrent throughout the entire movie. (To the extent Penny has an arc, or has one you might like to impose on her, "realizing that she is a monumentally abusive pet owner" tracks with the events of the plot; that this is not ever entirely explicit makes it a bit more heartbreaking, though, when the fundamental emotional core of the movie is very much Bolt's unconditional love for his disappointing mistress, such as may be summed up in the proverb, "the more I see of people, the more I love my dog.") But, nevertheless, for Mindy From the Network (Kari Wahlgren), it's not even cruel enough: she demands, Lasseter-style, more drama out of her show, and the director supplies this by way of a novelty for the program, a cliffhanger ending. The obfuscation of Penny's "fate" has the predictable effect upon Bolt, who escapes almost immediately after being put back in his trailer, but as he is physically robust but incompetent in every other regard, he gets himself accidentally sealed inside a cardboard box and shipped via air freight to New York City. Lost in a world he never made, and determining that styrofoam is a super-scientific countermeasure designed to rob him of his vast powers, and of course desperate to rescue Penny, once Bolt gets his bearings he pressgangs an agent of the malign Calico—in other words, an alley cat named Mittens (Susie Essman)—into serving as his guide, and on the way they pick up Bolt's biggest fan, a hamster named Rhino (Mark Walton) who also believes Bolt-the-show is a documentary. They adventure across the breadth of America and back to Hollywood, where Bolt will have to make a decision dependent on whether his life has been only mostly a lie, or entirely one.
If we leave aside (put a pin in, perhaps) the overweening big ask of its opening, Bolt is certainly getting close to the perfect version of itself. There are, for the most part, only little annoyances to come: sometimes these amount to just further, albeit smaller literalist objections—Mittens, who initially got herself into Bolt's crosshairs by running an extortion racket on the neighborhood pigeons, is satisfied with payoffs like bagels, prompting one to ask if anyone involved knew what cats' nutritional needs are—but the most thoroughgoing one is probably just the occasional return to Penny's TV industry satire, so if I seemed dismissive towards Cyrus it's only because her scenes are mostly all the same joke told the same way, usually via Greg Germann's unctuous sociopath of an agent, and because her drama revolves around a phony dilemma, namely the proposal that ending her search for the real Bolt and continuing her show with a replacement dog are somehow mutually exclusive. (Marking Bolt's return to Hollywood by having him be accosted by a group of new pigeons, who are screenwriting partners, and who want to irritatingly "pitch" the "star" of Bolt-the-show on their spec script ideas, isn't unfunny on its face—but it is this metacinematic satire's final and unwanted step from the usefully stupid into the sloppily moronic, so I feel a little gross when I laugh at it.) The one really big problem I have with Bolt is, I guess, almost invisible (I've never seen anyone complain about it), but it's a real snag in the midst of a wonderful climax that, even though there's a lot of Pixar in this, trades out the longeurs of a Pixar chase for something much simpler and more direct; basically, I don't know why Bolt has a need to inform Bolt by way of Mittens that Penny is, actually, still quite torn up about her lost doggie, when this film's fiery finale has put every last one of its chips down on the tearjerking power of a dog who would rescue her—or die with her—whether his single-minded devotion was returned or not. (Obviously, it still wins that easy bet.)
Otherwise, I don't know if it sets a foot wrong, story-wise, even on the level of nitpick; what I don't think I've been crystal clear about is that Bolt is predominantly a comedy, and whatever I've said in the past (I don't think I'm contradicting myself), I see no way not to acknowledge it as not necessarily "the best" but the funniest in Disney's "canon," including the likes of Aladdin and Hercules and The Emperor's New Groove, despite tacking towards a much different comedic sensibility—Bolt is very character- and situation-driven, rather than bent towards some flavor or another of cartoon anarchy. I have mentioned that it's more blackhearted than I think generally gets recognized, honestly just starting with its premise, which involves a horrifying campaign of manipulation against a pitiful innocent, and then turning that around and mocking Bolt's stupidity anyway, and having a ball with how dangerously unhinged Bolt's conditioning makes him once he's out in the real world, to the point that "a satire of contemporary media" remains part of its package even after we've left Hollywood (at numerous points Bolt is basically 24ing Mittens, at least as I understand 24, notably when he dangles her off an overpass); Rhino is even more contemptible, or at least Bolt has contempt for his analogues in our real world, because he thinks televisions are "magic box[es]" that show only factual reality. It all permits some very sharp dialogue, plus a downright shocking amount of anti-cat racism; I'm a cat person and generally do not care for dogs, yet it is possibly for that exact reason that I laughed my ass off at Bolt's characterizations of Mittens ("you're a degenerate creature of darkness") and at an exquisitely-timed montage of Bolt using his canine cuteness to win food from strangers that, in a mix-up, finds Mittens attempting the same feat and having a Goddamn frying pan thrown at her head. It's also very funny on Mittens's side, as she simultaneously laughs at her new unwanted companion's pathetic beliefs while still having to carefully navigate his bubble of unreality, because she's still a cat, he's still a dog, and he's a violent lunatic.
I'm not sure any of these things should be automatically funny (in a live-action movie about people, it'd certainly be a lot harder to pull it off; and it's worth noting that sometimes it's rather grim without being funny at all, including some pretty bleak appraisals of humanity's relationship to its pets such as form the basis of Mittens's secret tragedy). But it works, surprisingly well, for these adorable cartoon animals in this bright and shiny Disney film. It helps that our core cast is superb, Travolta accommodating a quintessential straightforward dogginess alongside the psychological rounding of a character who's amusingly full of himself and would benefit from being humbled, while Essman finds a more circuitously cunning (if often sharply cutting) cattiness for Mittens; and even Walton is jacked-up the way you'd want your cartoon hamster to be jacked-up, though it's a minor marvel that he's kept so productively and humorously irritating, rather than just obnoxiously shrill on behalf of a character that's only ever the two jokes, firstly the way he fannishly uses his Bolt-worship to aggrandize himself, and secondly the mere fact that he rolls around in a clear plastic ball. Hopefully, though, that second item indicates that the visual component of this character- and situation-driven comedy is not neglected: as befits a movie about a goof convinced beyond reason that he's actually a superhero, there's some pretty amazing cod-serious action, especially an attempt to board a speeding train that uses the mechanic of Bolt's leash, redeployed as a restraint for his feline captive, to make itself nerve-jangingly complex as it plays out, though even from the outset it's been going for both solid laughs (look at this idiot) and queasy thrills (this is suicidal) equal and alike. There's also a "prison-break caper" at an animal shelter that involves our heroes causing a (surprisingly mechanically-credible!) giant explosion.
It's all just very well-modulated and cleanly-told stuff. It surprises me to hear that the way its directors divided their duties was that Howard gravitated towards the animation and technology, while Williams had the most input into story development and layout, because—with respect—Williams's subsequent career has not taught me to associate him with the cleanest storytelling, particularly his post-Disney work in The Sea Beast, though I guess it does retain some pretty boss camera layout. (But then, Bolt is also where a certain Nathan Greno makes his first appearance in this retrospective, as head of story, and he'll shortly prove to be very important in conjunction with Howard.) Bolt, anyway, is not as revolutionary as what would come immediately after for CG animation at Disney, but it's less of an intermediate state between Tangled and, e.g., Meet the Robinsons, than I'd even remembered; it's several times closer to where WDAS was about to be than where it was just one year before.
On any given metric, this is absolutely "good 3-D animation that holds up": the actual animation qua animation of the character rigs doesn't sacrifice the essential comic cartooniness, but it gets some remarkably lovely semi-realistic canine and feline (and, I guess, crecidine) movement out of these characters,** so that Bolt might be still the best-observed animal animation to ever come from Disney by way of CGI (and so possibly from anywhere, especially if we decide that Finding Dory isn't a kinesiologically appropriate comparison); it's an enormous advance in texturing and rendering, with some cheating here and there on the integuments of our animal heroes if you're looking for it (and may just be me expecting to see cheating) because, mostly, it does come off as good cartoon fur, or, in several cases, good cartoon feathers. (In fact, I'd confidently declare this to contain the greatest pigeon animation in any medium, though I do not, to be honest, know what the competition would be. Whatever the case, the pigeons that sicced Bolt on Mittens in the first place—characters that are, endearingly enough, an extremely aggressive homage to Animaniacs' Goodfeathers—are just some incredibly diligent creations, a trio of pigeons each able to demonstrate their own distinctive personality and design in a relatively compact slice of screentime while, nonetheless, moving with the most superlative rock dove quality throughout the conversation and all that screentime, constantly reorienting their necks so they can get a proper picture of whom it is they're talking to.***) I could quibble about Mittens—for a cat, she sure does have some tiny freaking irises; I have never seen a cat whose eye-whites were half as noticeable as hers—but the caricatured light anthropomorphism is fun, in service to a figure whose modal emotion is "horrified and aghast."
Meanwhile, Bolt represents, at least as much, a big leap in everything behind those characters: it was the first roll-out of the technology that would go on to be an even bigger deal in Tangled, that permitted the return of a painterly patina to the backgrounds, and even though that's definitely there I appreciate that it's a more subliminal thing, and that Bolt is concerned mostly with something more like a very softly-airbrushed photorealism, insofar as Bolt, with its whole story revolving around the shock of leaving a manicured fantasy behind for reality, is one of the few cartoons I can think of offhand that wouldn't have any business being traditionally-animated, and which is actively demanding to be told in the medium of 3-D CGI with, for instance, a hefty, rust-covered train that really feels like it's barreling down a clattering track and could flatten our heroes if they don't treat it with the proper respect, which obviously they don't. It's all a very beautiful series of cityscapes and landscapes we get here for our road movie (did I mention that it has a swell adventure score courtesy John Powell?), and in the same vein, there's lighting effects that the previous CG Disneys couldn't have even dreamed of, the layouts having a blast with a whole lot of dramatic backlighting and saturated colors—always motivated, too, or at least motivated enough to scan—while as far as the little things go, even though both Meet the Robinsons and Bolt have scenes where the refracted green foliage is asked to refract again off the surfaces of our characters, the difference in technical capability here is overwhelming. Sometimes, Bolt (and Howard and Williams, and perhaps their "director of look and lighting," former DreamQuest Images guy Adolph Lusinsky), can seem like they're just showing off, for instance with Calico's henchmen's reflective helmets, or a with gag about the hamster hyperventilating inside his plastic ball that's pretty funny but is at least as much just stating aloud "we can do foggy diffusion on a backlit curved transparent surface (that's also scratched) now, and it ain't no big thing." The caveat is that the humans all still look a little disgusting, except (maybe) Penny, but, happily, this isn't nearly as serious a caveat as it sounds, since humans constitute a fairly small proportion of this movie's pixels.
If there's any other problem, it's such a perennial feature of comedies about asshole characters who learn to be nicer to one another that it clearly wouldn't be fair to hold it against Bolt, but the jokes do start to subside in the final third—the dividing line is probably the montaged penultimate leg of our heroes' journey, set to a sweetly-melancholic original country song, Jenny Lewis's "Barking At the Moon"—but it manages that transition well enough that I'm not sure it's the final third as much as it is the final quarter; and it's admirably efficient about ending as soon as it can, once all its various arcs have found their conclusions. Now, it's true, there was never anything overtly world-shaking about Bolt and its limited ambitions—mostly just getting WDAS back on the right track after going pretty badly off it during its early CGI era—and the consensus response, then as well as now, has mostly just been to sigh in relief that it's not the early or mid 00s at that studio anymore. That's not the meagerest legacy, but I've never not been a little bowled over by this little movie anyway, its cleverness, its heart, and, yes, just how decisively it declares that Disney's bad days were behind it. Well, you know, for a span of about eight years, but hey, nothing lasts forever.
Score: 9/10
*Am I nuts to feel like Sanders has spent his entire career making or trying to make the same movie over and over? (Heck, taking "cross-species friendship cartoon" literally, rather than what I meant by it, I guess that would include The Croods.)
**And how did Bolt tie that knot around Mittens? Offscreen, fortunately, though it was probably the same way she attacked him with a baseball bat. I mean, it's not Bambi.
***And, sadly, we're beyond the era where it's easy or even possible to single out animators to praise their contributions; but whoever was in charge of the pigeons, you did a bang-up job.
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