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Bolt has had a troubled history, as movies often do. It seems standard practice in Hollywood to work on a movie for a while with one artistic crew and then scrap it all and start from scratch when new management moves in. I can't imagine that this approach makes financial or artistic sense, but sometimes it just seems to be the way Hollywood does business. In this instance, the project was started by Chris Sanders, who wrote what is arguably the Disney studio's last genuinely good film, Lilo and Stitch. Unfortunately for Sanders, while he was working on this Bolt, which was then called American Dog and featured a giant radioactive rabbit, Disney made someone new their Chief Creative Officer. Specifically, they put John Lasseter, the cofounder of Pixar (and a fellow who had once been fired from Disney) in charge of both Pixar and the Disney animation studio, and Lasseter found Sanders' film too quirky.

And so we end up with Bolt, a tale of an eponymous little white dog, voiced by John Travolta, who stars in a television show in which he has an assortment of superpowers and an ongoing mission to protect a young girl, voiced by Miley Cyrus. The movie's conceit is that, in order to get a believable performance from Bolt, the fact that he is an animal actor on a show has been carefully concealed from him. It's a stretch, but, then, we live in a time when mental patients are starting to believe they are unwitting participants on a reality television show, a condition that has been named after the movie The Truman Show. So instead we have a dog with the opposite psychosis, who earnestly believes that he has astonishing powers and his young charge is in constant jeopardy. As a result, Bolt cannot relax for a moment -- the film shows him in his studio trailer, locked into a sort of perpetual state of nervous alertness, convinced that bad men might show up at any moment and do really awful things to the girl he loves.

Convinced she has been kidnapped, Bolt breaks out of the studio and immediately hijacks an alleycat named Mittens, certain she is in on the plot. Mittens is a great piece of animation, having an enormous head with wide, bewildered eyes, all perched atop a skeletal, arched body; she is voiced by Susie Essman as a creature whose default mode is no-nonsense sarcasm. They embark upon a road trip across America, somewhere along the way picking up a guinea pig in a clear plastic ball who manages to be both an obsessive fanboy of Bolt's television show and the closest thing the film comes to an actual superhero: In one scene, the guinea pig (voiced by Mark Walton) responds to an emergency with a weary pronouncement that he's going to go get a ladder; moments later, impossibly, we see that he has found a full-sized ladder and figured out a way to drag it around. On this trip, Bolt must comes to terms with the realization that his life up until now has been a lie and figure out his worth in life as just a dog, all of which is handled by a single montage sequence.

Bolt is not a bad film, per se, but Lasseter seems to have brought to the film many of Pixars' weakness and few of their strengths. For one thing, the film tends to mistake scenes of jeopardy for plot points, as was the case with Finding Nemo, and, to an extent, all of Pixar's projects. When the film seems to be lagging, the filmmakers just put their characters in physical dancer -- for instance, in this film, out of the blue, the animals get picked up by an animal control officer. This scene isn't indigenous to the story. Nothing has led up to it. We just reach a point where something exciting needs to happen, and, there he is, a man with a net. This is a pretty common problem in animated films, and, come to think of it, movies in general, and, to be fair, this film shares with Pixar a great deal of visual inventiveness when it comes to lensing these scenes. But they are a poor substitute for good plotting. Instead, Bolt feels vague and episodic, which is especially disappointing for what is essentially a road movie. Although the filmmakers send their characters cross-country from New York to Los Angeles, they show very little curiosity about any specific location. America is just so much grassy roadside to them, at least until the characters reach Las Vegas. For a film that takes such pains to paint the Los Angeles film colony as parochial types who have no interests outside the bottom line of the cinematic product, it's a bit ironic that the film's creators treat most of America as flyover (or, in this case, drive-past) territory. It also feels like a wasted opportunity, as the middle of America is a fascinating and quirky place; perhaps Lasseter just found it too quirky.