Bolt

In an effort to establish some sense of completion, I put the film Bolt on my Netflix queue, because it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film, while Waltz With Bashir was not. It would be improper to castigate the Animator's branch for this seeming faux pas without actually seeing Bolt. Well, the film was popular, and sat at the top of my queue for more than two months, but finally arrived for my perusal. The upshot? An acceptable Disney entertainment for tots.

Of course it's not better than Waltz With Bashir, but if you think about it, you can understand why it got a nod while the Israeli anti-war film did not. Animators, I suspect, are interested in animation. Waltz With Bashir's animation is somewhat primitive and stylistic, and secondary to the theme of the piece. In fact, it's really animated because, as a documentary, there is no actual footage of the events told. Bolt, on the other hand, is the kind of child-oriented animated tale that professional animators work for years on, Faberge eggs that open in thousands of theaters at the same time. The story, really, is beside the point.

Bolt is a dog who is the star of a TV show, but he doesn't know it. He's in sort of a canine version of The Truman Show, as he really thinks he has superpowers and is protecting his owner, Penny, from villains. When he is loosed from his trailer and finds himself out in the real world, he discovers that he's an ordinary dog, and with the help of an alley cat and a plastic-encased hamster, works his way across country to a reunion.

This is all fine and perfectly ordinary. There's the requisite slapstick and heartstring-tugging (I admit I got a little choked up at the inevitable reunion--I'm human, after all) and the moralizing is kept mostly at bay (the strongest message is a good one--children and dogs should be kept out of show business). The voice-actors are John Travolta as the intrepid pooch and teen sensation Miley Cyrus as the kid, but Susie Essman steals the show as the dyspeptic cat Mittens.

Where Bolt excels is in its craftsmanship. I read online that the animators used the paintings of Edward Hopper and the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond as guides. Now neither of those names leaped to mind while viewing, but I was frequently astonished at the precision of the backgrounds. The opening shot is a pet store window, which reflects the street behind it, and if I didn't know better I would have thought it was live action. The same could be said of when the animals arrive in Las Vegas and marvel at the lights of the Strip. Of course this is all done with computers but someone has to program those computers, right? We're not in the Terminator era of machine-rule yet, are we?