Directed by Bryan Howard & Chris Williams
Screenplay by Dan Fogelman & Chris Williams

Cast (Voices)
John Travolta as Bolt
Miley Cyrus as Penny
Susie Eastman as Mittens
Mark Walton as Rhino
Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Calico

Rated PG for some mild action and peril

Of course we anthropomorphize our pets.  If we didn't view their quirks and characteristics through the prism of human behavior, would we really look to dogs, cats, birds and fish to keep us company?  So, it's not really surprising that Hollywood has spent many years assuring us that our four-legged friends are even more like us than we think; speaking English, standing on two legs, and visiting psychiatrists.  A little of this is cute, a lot of it tends to be grating, but the new 3D Disney flick Bolt finds an intriguing happy medium.  It's about a dog who was placed as a puppy onto a sort of canine Truman Show by unscrupulous (and presumably insane) filmmakers who sought to convince him to live his life for their cameras as a superhero rather than a simple dog.  Yes, all of Bolt's animals are just like people, but they're also just like animals, and the film has as much fun with their non-human attributes as their human ones.  Perhaps even more shocking for a Disney product, its' moralizing about heroism and relationships rings true, resulting in a hugely entertaining comedy that also tugs the heartstrings of critter-loving softies like me.

Bolt (voice of John Travolta) is a dog adopted at a young age by Penny (Miley Cyrus), a feisty teen whose father (Sean Donnellan) is more or less the good guy version of a mad scientist.  His inventions are constantly sought by the evil Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell), and to protect Penny, her Dad genetically enhanced Bolt into a super-dog who shoots lasers out of his eyes, bends steel with his paws and crushes tanks with the ferocity of his Superbark.  Except, of course, for the fact that this is really just a TV show.  Penny is just an actress, and all these scenarios have been exhaustingly staged by The Director (James Lipton) for Bolt's benefit.  He believes that no dog could ever really act, so to get the courage and loyalty he needs out of his canine star, he's got to convince him that everything is real.  The network suits don't seem to mind the hundreds of millions of dollars all this must cost, but they can't abide any sort of drop in the ratings, so they insist that more danger and tragedy be inserted into the story.  Penny's already feeling horrible that Bolt no longer wants to play with his toys or do any of the things normal dogs do (he's too busy watching for danger at every turn), but when the plot calls for her to be abducted and the dog locked away in a cage overnight, her worst fears are realized:  Bolt escapes.  But with no real superpowers, he ends up knocking himself out and falling into a box of foam packing peanuts, which is shipped across country where he begins his search for Penny.  Because the only cats he knows are the minions of Dr. Calico, he abducts alley cat Mittens (Susie Eastman) and insists that she show him Penny's location.  Using his collar as a clue, she sets them on a path to Hollywood, and they're joined on their quest by Rhino (Mark Walton), a Bolt-worshiping hamster who believes in his superpowers just as much as the dog himself.  But their journey is leading the super-dog toward a collision with cold, hard truth.  And if he's not a superhero, just what is Bolt?

He's a dog, silly, and the great triumph of Directors Bryan Howard and Chris Williams (Williams co-wrote the script with Dan Fogelman) is that they're actually able to make being a plain old dog seem cooler than being a fake superhero.  It helps that they're also able to contrast real and fake heroism effectively, and that Penny must also make a choice between being the Hollywood phony who'd participate in the conspiracy against her own dog and a real girl (I couldn't help but wonder what Cyrus, just beginning the long, hard slide down the rabbit hole of teenage celebrity backlash, thought about this role).  We've seen the plot where the superhero loses his powers and has to learn to be a hero as a normal man many times before, but there's a couple of special novelties to the notion of him learning to be a hero as a normal dog, and also the notion that the “powers” were a trick to start with.  I'm sure I'm not the only person to groan at the Bolt trailer and its' notion that so much was faked as such expense for a dog's benefit, but if you agree to accept that notion (and it is easier to swallow in an animated movie than it would be in a live-action one), the emotional journey it incites is surprisingly rich.

The vocal performances are a big part of the movie's success, led by Travolta, whose larger-than-life cheerful intensity has always been a good fit for delusional characters.  Cyrus is also effective as Penny, who just knows she's a heel but keeps letting herself get talked into doing the wrong thing, a much more interesting character than you tend to see in “girl and her pet” stories.  Her slickster agent (Greg Gerrmann) is one of those characters who's a lot funnier to people who have agents than those of us who don't, but surprisingly little of Bolt's showbiz satire feels so self-congratulatory.  So too does Essman have more luck than usual with the “the girl knows everything” nature of the Mittens role, in part because we do think of cats as smart and dogs as sincere, but also because she's able to sell us the darker shadings of the character.  It's interesting to see animated movies moving away from feeling the need to assign every role to a celebrity and instead to see vocal actors like Walton re-emerge in the medium.  Rhino is an inspired comic creation, and his chipper, hyper-enthusiastic line readings are a big reason why.

The animation looks great, all the more so in 3D, where the hair on these animated animals looks stunningly, reach-out-and-touch-it real.  I was amazed by the carrot chew toy that symbolizes Bolt's lost innocence.  Not only is it wonderfully rendered (the cheerful smile painted on it is beyond perfect for what it's meant to represent), but with the shading of the edges and the subtle reflections you can catch on its' surface, it's the most fully dimensional object I've ever seen on a movie screen.  Bolt is interestingly casual about its' 3Dness, pretty much never throwing things at the camera or otherwise reaching beyond the plane of the screen.  It's all about the dimension of what's behind the screen, and I once again HIGHLY recommend making sure you've got a seat in the middle of the theater to get maximum impact out of this awesome new technology.

Obviously, it helps to be sentimental when watching a movie like this, but dogs tend to bring that out in people, and Bolt is one of the more convincingly canine dogs I've seen in a movie in a long time (even live-action movie dogs rarely do “real dog” stuff like spin around before lying down).  And the movie that contains him is spunky, funny, and heartfelt.  And if you love dogs, showbiz and 3D like I do, it's hard to do better than Bolt.