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Bolt Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG (for some mild action and peril) Genre: Animated, Family Theater release: November 21, 2008 by Walt Disney Studios Directed by: Byron Howard, Chris Williams Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes Cast: John Travolta (Bolt), Miley Cyrus (Penny), Susie Essman (Mittens), Mark Walton (Rhino), Malcolm McDowell (Dr. Calico), James Lipton (The Director), Greg Germann (The Agent), Grey DeLisle (Penny's Mom) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

It has been nearly three years since Disney and Pixar settled their differences, leading one company to buy the other. But while Disney technically owns the Pixar label now, the minds that created Pixar in the first place have been calling the shots at Disney Animation ever since the merger—and the first significant result of their efforts is Bolt, a cartoon that could perhaps be best described as "Pixar Lite."

The movie—which concerns a dog who stars on a hit TV show and is accidentally stranded in another part of the country—was originally conceived by Chris Sanders, whose Lilo & Stitch was one of the very few bona fide animated hits to come out of the Mouse House in recent years. But when Pixar chief John Lasseter took the reins at Disney, he dismissed Sanders from the project and gave the job of directing this film to Byron Howard and Chris Williams, both of whom had worked there as writers and artists but neither of whom had ever directed a feature-length film before.

Bolt the wonder dog (voiced by John Travolta)

Characters were redesigned, the story was rewritten, Lasseter took an executive-producer credit, and the end result is a film that borrows more than a few elements from Pixar's earlier films—including, thankfully, some of their heart.

Take the character of Bolt (voice of John Travolta) himself. He's a dog who plays a genetically-altered super-mutt named Bolt on a TV show named Bolt—but, like Buzz Lightyear in the first Toy Story, he doesn't realize that he's living in a world of fiction. He thinks the TV show is real, and that he is really lifting cars with his teeth and burning holes through metal objects with his laser vision, and that Penny (Miley Cyrus), the girl who raised him, really needs him to protect her every week. He doesn't realize there are special-effects teams around every corner, anticipating and recording his every superheroic move. It's like The Truman Show for puppies.

And then, one day, to keep their ratings up, the TV show's producers decide to play with their format. Instead of ending their newest episode with Bolt and Penny together, as they have on all their previous episodes, they end on a cliffhanger, with Penny abducted by the bad guys and Bolt stranded in the villains' lair—and Bolt, desperate to save Penny, escapes from the TV studio as soon as he can. One thing leads to another, and the next thing he knows, Bolt has been accidentally taped inside a cardboard box and shipped to New York City—where he becomes convinced that the pink Styrofoam packing peanuts in the box have robbed him of his powers.

Penny (Miley Cyrus) is Bolt's owner and co-star

Since Bolt is convinced that all cats are agents of the evil Green-Eyed Man (Malcolm McDowell)—a villain whose cat-eye-shaped symbol looks rather like the heroes' logo in The Incredibles—Bolt finds a homeless alley cat named Mittens (Susie Essman) and forces her to help him find his way back across the country, and along the way they are joined by a hamster named Rhino (Mark Walton) who is such a big, big, big fan of the TV show that it's not entirely clear at first whether he knows that it's really all just make-believe. And so, like Woody in Toy Story 2, Bolt, cut off from the human child that owns him, learns about the meaning of fame, home, and other things with the help of a female (like TS2's Jessie) who has a sad story to tell and a short, hairy male (like Stinky Pete) who spends most of the movie behind plastic (in this case, a hamster ball).

The three main animal characters are all funny and engaging in their own ways, and that is as much a credit to the animators as it is to the actors who provided the animals' voices: Bolt is fiercely loyal, tough and determined, yet also wide-eyed with bewilderment when he finds he can no longer run through windows and fences or leap across big holes in the ground; Mittens is scrappy and sarcastic but not too abrasive, before she reveals that she, too, can care for a friend; and Rhino steals the show with his zealous fanboyishness. But there are other, smaller characters who are just as entertaining, most notably the pigeons who pop up here and there across the country, each reflecting the accents and mannerisms of their various locales.

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