Review of Bolt (2008) by Rachel H — 24 Dec 2010

This movie was by no means the best Disney has ever created, but by no means the worst. I never really much cared for the non-pixar CGI films of Disney, seeing as they have been just average in quality (except Meet the Robinsons), but my expectations were slightly superceded by this decent animated comedy. The story is well-worn and familiar, but for its flaws, they make up for it with striking visuals, decent voice work, and some awesome comic-relief pigeons.

For an animated film to work, it has to have different elements to it, one of which is striking visuals. This definitely has good realistic looking CGI visuals. I did not see this in 3D (like I heard it was in select theatres), so the animation never really made me immersed into the story, but needless to say, it's still pretty good by Disney standards. Leave it to Disney to provide great animation in a world of constant CGI and shitty 3D conversions.

Another element an animated film has to have to work is some great or at least semi-passable voice acting, and this has some good ones. Bolt himself was voiced by John Travolta (which I did not know until the credits) and Bolt's Owner, Penny is voiced by Miley Cyrus. I know, I dislike her just as much as many, but she actually isn't half bad in this movie. I'm not sure which people do the rest of the voice work, but whichever people voiced the comic relief pigeons did a bang-up job.

The biggest element that has to work for a good animated movie is story, and sadly, Bolt is lacking in that department. Not that the story wasn't decent, it certainly was, but it was just very familiar and not all that original. The basic story is that Bolt is the star of a tv show where he has all sorts of great crime-fighting powers. He gets separated from his owner and tries to get along because he thinks he actually has all these powers, but he doesn't. Penny gets kidnapped and Bolt, along with a hamster, have to rescue her from the eevil people who have taken her. This formula has been seen loads of times before, but the movie is sufficiently cute and has a bit more going for it to make the audience more forgiving of the tired story.

So that's Bolt in a nutshell. How does it hold up? Well, it holds up quite decently, but gets shoved into the middle of the heap of much better (and much worse) disney movies. It's cute, and it has good visuals, good voice acting, and sufficiently likeable characters to make it a passable movie. Just like I said, there are a lot of disney movies that are much better, but a lot of the non-pixar CGI movies are much worse (except for Meet the Robinsons). I haven't seen Tangled yet, but I want to to see if it's better. All in all, a decent film.