Comic-Con attendees pack the biggest auditorium at the Los Angeles Convention center on Saturday to view footage upcoming Disney animated features. Directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard were kind enough to show nearly 20 minutes of animation from Bolt, an adventure-comedy that will hit theaters in stereoscopic 3-D and traditional versions on Nov. 26.
Bolt tells the story of a canine TV star (voiced by John Travolta) that is inadvertently shipped from Hollywood to New York City. During his cross-country journey home to his owner, Penny (Miley Cyrus), he makes the surprising discovery that his TV super powers don’t work in the real world. He his joined in his adventure by a jaded, abandoned housecat named Mittens (Susie Essman) and a TV-obsessed hamster in a plastic ball named Rhino.
The pic is yet another entry in the talking animals on an adventure category, but the footage screened was highly entertaining and promising. After struggling with such recent entries as Brother Bear, Home on the Range and Meet the Robinsons. Walt Disney Feature Animation could be looking at its biggest hit in some time.
Some of the animation shown was still in rough form, with storyboard images standing in for certain shots, but a lot of it was beautifully rendered. The longest clip presented was a thrilling and funny action sequence that depicts Bolt and Penny in one of their TV adventures. Bolt runs at lightning speed, leaps over helicopters, flips cars and unleashes a devastating bark that demolishes a desert road and wipes out an army of advancing bad guys. Peppered with clever humor, the big, ridiculous action set piece will have audiences cheering and sufficiently engaged for the more subtle moments that follow.
Howard and Williams then introduced a very funny clip where one of Bolt’s fellow animal actors, a cat voiced by Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, makes sport of the dog’s delusion by taunting him in character when the cameras aren’t rolling. Rhino the hamster, voiced by animator Mark Walton, was introduced in another clip where he helps Bolt spring mittens from an animal control center. much of the comic relief seems to fall on Rhino’s rodent shoulders, and the film;s directors are confident that the character will be big hit with moviegoers.
Bolt is one of the projects that went through some revisions when Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull took over Disney’s animation operations. When what it was like to work with Lasseter, Williams responded, ‘John really is everything you hope he would be. He can be a tough, demanding boss, always pushing for more and more, but he’s the best boss you could have for animation.’
Williams and Howard also spoke briefly about the patent-pending technology developed at Disney to allow the animators to put brush strokes on CG surfaces to give the backgrounds a more painterly quality. The results are on full display in the film’s first trailer, which can be viewed at www.disney.com/bolt.
