 Starring: John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Malcolm McDowell, Susie Essman, Mark Walton
Director: Chris Williams, Byron Howard
Year Of Release: 2008
Plot: Bolt is the canine star of a fictional TV show. However the whole thing is filmed to carefully ensure the dog never knows it isn’t real. However when Bolt accidentally gets shipped across the country and into the real world, he has to make his way home, with only a cat and a hamster to help him. His new chums also have to break the news to him that in real life he can’t really do the superpowered things he does in the show. |
A couple of weeks ago in the Movie-A-Day feature about
Beauty & The Beast, I wrote about how Bolt was the first movie produced under the guidance of John Lasseter, after Disney bought Pixar and then installed the Toy Story and Cars director as the head of Disney Animation (although Disney has always distributed Pixar movies, they’re produced completely separately to other Disney films).
He was brought in because for the first time in its history, Disney wasn’t just in danger of losing its animation crown, but also becoming a completely spent force. Hand-drawn animated movie like Treasure Planet and Home on the Range underperformed, and rather than admitting that they had failed in the story department, Disney decided their lack of success was because no one wanted to watch traditionally animated movies in this CGI age. So despite having a heritage in hand-drawn animation going back to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, they dropped the pencils and ink and went CG.
However this didn’t immediately solve the problems, partly because Disney was comparatively late into the computer animated game. Not only did the likes of Chicken Little and Meet The Robinsons not have the quality and detail of other CGI movie, but they were still failing massively in the story department.
Of course Disney has had fallow periods before, most notably from the early-70s through the late-80s, which started off with good but not great films like The Rescuers and The Aristocats, and then descended into drivel like Basil the Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company. However while the films got worse and worse, Disney was still the king, because nobody had the money, expertise or will to really challenge them. Don Bluth tried with the likes of An American Tale and The Land Before Time, but these were isolated successes compared to the endless Disney production line.
However things are different this time around. For a start Dreamworks Animation also has a production line and is bringing out one or two films a year, which have generally started to outgross what Disney is producing. Not only that, but with family films getting more and more profitable, the other studios are getting in on the act and having massive success. Fox has made millions with the likes of Ice Age and Robots, Warner had a huge hit with Happy Feet and Sony is getting in on the act with Surf’s Up and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.
For the first time in its history, Disney looks like it’s in danger of becoming an also-ran in the animation world, whose only successes come from distributing CG movies made by another company, Pixar (which admittedly they do own). When Disney purchased the Toy Story studio for $7.4 billion in 2006, some people questioned whether the House of Mouse was paying far too much for the studio. While purely financially they’ll probably do very well out of it, what fewer people mentioned was that they weren’t just buying the studio, they were purchasing the expertise of John Lasseter and co., realising this was probably the best bet to save Disney’s proud animation heritage.
Pixar has had an almost unprecedented record. Since Toy Story in 1995, they’ve only ever had hits. In fact, in terms of average gross per film released, Pixar is the most successful company in Hollywood. So if you’re Disney, a company that was founded on producing the best popular animation in the world and your crown is about to be stolen by numerous other companies, Pixar are the definitely that guys you want to bring in to save the day.
Almost as soon as the deal was announced, John Lasseter was installed as head of Disney animation, and he quickly set about making changes. One of the first things he did was take all of the projects that Disney had in development and which weren’t nearly completed back to the story stage. This was where he thought Disney was largely going wrong, in that while they were heavily investing in getting their CGI up to par, they’d lost their ability to tell classic tales that would resonate for generations. Although Lasseter only had time to tinker a little with Meet The Robinsons, he absolutely gutted Bolt, which by the time he got involved was already starting to be animated.
Although there was definitely a feel of him throwing his weight around to show he was the boss, he quickly fired Chris Sanders, co-director of Lilo & Stitch, and brought in animator Byron Howard and writer Chris Williams to take over on Bolt (which at that point was called American Dog). The new directors were told to completely revamp the entire project and turn it into something that felt genuine to them. Lasseter saw the basic idea of the film as a good one (which isn’t surprising as Bolt is basically a canine Buzz Lightyear), but thought it was being wrecked by the direction Disney was taking it.
While the idea of a pampered canine who thinks the TV show he appears in is real and that he’s got superpowers, but who ends realising he’s just an ordinary dog, was retained, everything else, from the supporting characters to the look and feel of the movie was jettisoned. Bolt’s original companions, a male cat called Ogo, who worked as a mechanic, and an oversized radioactive rabbit, became the female feline Mittens and hamster Rhino, and rather than largely taking place in the American south-west, it became a cross-country trip. Even Bolt himself was originally called Henry.
Lasseter also worked hard to bring a different visual style to the movie. While Disney’s previous CG efforts had been rather clean and clinical, Lasseter wanted to bring in some of what made Pixar’s movies special and allow Bolt to take place in a world that looked warm and lived-in (many at Pixar have said that half the work in animating one of their movies is adding dirt and texture to give it a real quality). As a result the directors looked at American landscape paintings, and also the feel of old Disney hand-drawn backgrounds and then tried to incorporate that into the film.
The result certainly didn’t look like anything Disney had produced in CG before, and while it wasn’t a hit on a par with Pixar’s movies, it took over $300 million around the world, almost doubling what Meet The Robinsons had made the year before. However while Bolt was the first film Lasseter oversaw when he took over at Disney, and certainly suggests he’s moving things in the right direction to turn the House of Mouse back into an animation powerhouse, it is true that the movie was in development before he got to the studio. However from now on we’ll really get to see whether he can save the day, with films that only existed after he took over.
The first of these, The Princess & the Frog, is currently enjoying a two cinema release in the US, before it expands across America on December 11th and then hits the UK on February 5th. The film is important for several reasons. For a start it’s the first movie that Lasseter initiated himself when he took over, it’s also Disney’s first hand-drawn feature since the studio announced they were giving up on the format following the massive flop that was 2004’s Home On The Range. Perhaps just as importantly it’s based on a classic fairy tale and has musical numbers in it, which Lasseter wanted, as while Disney had moved towards ever more random seeming animated movies, he felt they should leave that to other studios (like Pixar) and get back to what has made Disney special for the past 70 years, which is largely telling classic tales, often based on fairy stories.
So far it seems to have worked, with RottenTomatoes currently giving Princess & the Frog a Fresh rating of 83%, and most reviews noting how it feels like a return to what Disney does best.
Next up is an attempt to marry the visual feel of hand-drawn animation with a CG world in Rapunzel, which is, of course, also based on a classic fairytale. That film, featuring Mandy Moore in the title role, is due out next year. There’s also a new Winnie The Pooh movie due for 2011, and The King of the Elves in 2012 (which is based on a Philip K. Dick story, but is far more fantasy than sci-fi and sees two elves living in the modern day American south, naming a human their king). It certainly feels as if Lasseter is trying to return to how Disney used to do things, taking things back to a time when other animated movies might have been entertaining but seemed transitory, while the House of Mouse created films that immediately felt special and timeless.
Whether Lasseter can revive Disney Animation’s fortunes is yet to be seen, but it certainly feels as if he’s moving things in the right direction to create some more genuine House of Mouse classics. And his gutting of the original version of Bolt shows he’s not afraid of stepping on a few toes to achieve it.
CLICK HERE to read our exclusive interview with Bolt director Chris Williams
TIM ISAAC
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