If I called Igor on being too like a whole raft of other things, then I’ve gotta be fair and point out from the start that Bolt is really just Toy Story in new clothes. Replace Buzz Lightyear – a toy spaceman confronted with the plastic hard fact of his fiction – with a little girl’s pup who believes he is the superdog he plays in a top TV show, and you pretty much have Bolt. The difference between this movie’s familiarity and Igor’s with its multiple sources? What can I say except this is just plain better.

The movie opens with one of the best action sequences I have seen since the first Matrix sequel – John Powell’s score is fantastic and on top of the thrills there are laugh-out-loud visual gags. Where a movie like Igor has me glad to find other things to do, this one makes me put things down as I find myself more and more incapable of removing my eyes from the screen. This, and considering how fully adorable I found first the younger Penny then of course Miley Penny, the best news here is how the movie kept me happy even in its middle section without her. In Mittens we have a kind of substitute for Jessie of the Toy Story sequel (which arguably told the same story, too) – her monologue that begins with her making an argument for Bolt not returning to Penny but ends with her finally revealing some of her backstory is just one of many moments that reminded me of the gutwrenching “When She Loved Me” scene in Toy Story 2.

Basically, it has all the substance these movies require on top of the great animation (which, incidentally, even that is better than Igor and the like – take the characters out of some scenes and you’d think you were looking at a photograph … heck, even some of the character stuff left this impression on me) that Igor sorely lacked. I kinda knew it from the moment at the start with the toy carrot. I just knew as soon as I saw the look between Bolt and Penny, “if it comes back to that carrot at the end, I’m gonna be in tears,” … you guess whether I needed tissues or not Needless to say, Disney, thank you, this makes up for Tinker Bell almost like Meet the Robinsons did for The Wild.

Tags: animation, CG, cuties, Disney, dog, superhero

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 9:18 pm and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.