Robots and Underpants

A Bolt of Fresh Air

By Kevin Quigley

November 22, 2008

I’ll never forget the palpable excitement I felt heading into the theater. The year was 2001 and it was summer, and the big event movie for me was Atlantis: The Lost Empire. I’d dragged my friend Tracey to it, even though she doesn’t particularly care for animation, and I could sense some of my excitement was catching. I was literally bouncing up and down in my seat, waiting for the magic to start.

I never stopped waiting. For all its terrific hype and marketing, Atlantis had failed as a creative project. Failed utterly, and when I left the theater, I actually felt betrayed. I wasn’t then a Disney fanatic, but I had loved Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and The Lion King, I’d liked Mulan a lot more than I had thought I would, and I had (and still have) a special place in my heart for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, still among of the most underrated Disney films. This company gave me Atlantis? Honestly?

Dejected, I mistakenly skipped Lilo & Stitch, instead preferring to wait for the execrable Treasure Planet. My questionable judgment was rewarded with palpable disappointment … and it just didn’t stop there. What followed was a testament to a company that had lost its way. Brother Bear was merely serviceable. Home on the Range was … just intolerable. It seemed strange that someone like Michael Eisner, the then-current CEO of Disney who had spearheaded the second Golden Age of Disney films (starting with The Little Mermaid and ending somewhere around Tarzan) could have steered his company so wrong.

Meanwhile, a tiny subsidiary of Disney, an upstart little company called Pixar, was doing something that Disney couldn’t seem to do at all: it was making quality animated films. What’s more, it was doing it with the relatively new technology of computer animation. Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc: four movies that had been both critical and commercial hits, each one grossing more at the box office than the last. It was obvious that they were doing something right, and that Disney, who distributed their films, was not. Eisner, in what would become a characteristic display of poor judgment, ordered that all traditional animation be stopped in favor of computer animation. What he failed to recognize was that it wasn’t the medium that was the problem, it was the movies.

Around this time, Pixar asked for more money and more control of their product. Disney – with Eisner at the helm – wouldn’t budge. Their distribution agreement had given them almost total control over Pixar’s product. Eisner tried to convince his shareholders that Pixar’s special brand of magic wouldn’t last forever, and that they could stand on their own just fine without Pixar’s help. When Eisner attended a test screening for the new Pixar film, Finding Nemo, he walked out of it chuckling, telling people that it was awful, that it would be Pixar’s first flop. He was wrong.

Finding Nemo went on to become Pixar’s greatest achievement yet, grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide. Eisner was ousted from Disney, who released their own first computer animated film, an embarrassing little film called Chicken Little. No one was impressed.
More behind the scenes wheeling and dealing happened. It’s actually an interesting story, told most recently in the terrific book The Pixar Story. Something else was happening around this time, too: I was becoming a Disney lunatic. I seem to often glom on to pop culture phenomena while they are at uncharacteristic ebb. This is the only way to explain how I discovered Bruce Springsteen during what is largely considered to be the only “bad period” of his career, the Human Touch/Lucky Town era. Or maybe I just have a sense when things are about to get better.

See, after the dust settled, the fine folks over at Pixar had been given the keys to the Kingdom. John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, was now in the new capacity of Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation. The last project in the Eisner pipeline – an all right film called Meet the Robinsons – premiered to tepid audiences and mediocre reviews. Now it was time for John Lasseter to prove himself.

In barks Bolt, which premiered today. It’s the story of a celebrity dog so immersed in his own television world that he doesn’t even know he’s an actor. The producers of his television show have seen to it that Bolt believes everything about the world he’s in, a hyperreality in which he has super powers and is on a mission with “his person,” Penny to stop The Green-Eyed Man. (The opening sequences are among the most action-packed I’ve ever seen in a Disney film. It’s contemporary stuff – planes and bombs and highways – but it can easily rival the battle scenes in Sleeping Beauty or The Black Cauldron.)

At the Networks’ insistence, the show decides to shake things up by introducing a cliffhanger. Penny is “kidnapped,” but Bolt has no idea that the kidnapping is staged. Intent on finding Penny at any cost, Bolt breaks away from the set of his show – the only home he’s ever known – and inadvertently finds himself in a box being shipped across the country. When he’s freed, he finds himself alone and lost in New York City … and still believing he’s Bolt the Super Dog.

This is where the movie really kicks into high gear. With the assistance of a sassy alley cat named Mittens (voiced by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman, in pitch-perfect casting) and a pudgy hamster named Rhino, Bolt takes to the road on a cross-country search for Penny. It’s sort of a high concept – The Truman Show meets The Incredible Journey – but Disney manages to make the film rise above mere concept. It’s one of the funniest Disney films I’ve ever seen – there’s a sequence in which Mittens teaches Bolt how to beg for food that had me literally bent over, laughing – but it’s got its share of pathos, too. Rhino may exist mainly for comic relief, but Mittens had a real story behind her. Disney/Pixar enthusiasts might some similarities between Bolt and Toy Story 2 … a healthy comparison.

In the end, Bolt is a funny, sweet, sentimental buddy comedy – nothing more, nothing less. I’m okay with that because the movie did its job in keeping me happily entertained for over an hour. It may not be groundbreaking, but neither were The Rescuers nor Robin Hood, two of my very favorite Disney films.

Bolt marks the first Disney film under Lasseter’s watch, but it won’t be the last. Following this, we’re going to see a return to traditional Disney animation, with the 2-D musical The Princess and the Frog. After that, an entirely different kind of computer animated film with Rapunzel. I’m all in favor of Disney going back to its fairy-tale roots, and Lasseter, a fiend for Disney history, would love to restore his company to its rightful place in pop culture mythology. If Bolt is any indication, Disney is finally, finally on the right track again. It’s never been a better time to be a Disney lunatic.