Movie Revew: Bolt

I hadn't heard of Disney's Bolt until my friend Sky reviewed it over at her blog. (This is the part of the review where Jennifer laughs at me for living under a rock.) We don't have television reception or cable or anything. We don't take a newspaper. We get our news from the internet. If CNN homepage doesn't report it or you bloggers don't say it, it may take me awhile to hear about it. (Somewhat pathetic but I'll take the trade off any day.) Just because we don't have tv in the "traditional sense" does not mean that we do not watch tv. We just do our watching via DVDs where there are no commercial interruptions.

Anyway, based on Sky's glowing recommendations, I knew I wanted to see this movie. It took us two weeks to even find a copy to rent. Obviously this movie was popular! I began to despair of our ever seeing it. At the same time, while I waited, I had great hopes that it was going to be something fabulous! I'm happy to say that my hopes were justified and not dashed. I loved this movie!

A short description from Wikipedia (because why repeat?):

The film's plot centers around a small white dog named Bolt who, having spent his entire life on the set of a television series, thinks that he has super powers. When he believes that his human, Penny, has been kidnapped, he sets out on a cross-country journey to "rescue" her.

Once Bolt is off the studio set he begins to notice that his super powers aren't working. He mistakenly believes that this is due to the effects of styrofoam - which he has never heard of before and only recently came into contact with. He freaks out and comes to grips with reality with the help of a cat named Mittens and an incredibly hilarious hamster sidekick named Rhino.

The hamster, by the way, was my favorite character as I previously predicted he would be.



Our son didn't really get into it past the first few minutes of seeing Bolt when he was just an itty bitty cute wittle puppy. (Bookworm1 couldn't stop laughing over the puppy antics.) After that he noted that there were some explosions on the screen and spent the next hour jumping into a blanket creating his own sound effects and explosions. (I'm not sure what that was all about.)

Our concern in movies that we would consider showing him is that they will be too dark in mood or content. The movie opens with some action scenes, depicting the way of the tv show that our young hero of a dog is involved with. There are helicopters and motorcycles and several explosions. After the first 15 minutes though the movie relaxes into a cross-country adventure of Bolt trying to find his person with a rather cynical cat and with the wit of a hamster. Superbly done.

We really enjoyed this movie and I did not note anything objectionable about it. We weren't sure how Bookworm1 would handle the first bit of action but he seemed only delighted and not bothered at all. I thought Disney handled the suspense aspect very well so as not to come across frightening at all - just over the top funny. That's how it played off with us and it went over very well. We were happy with it.

Thanks, Sky, for mentioning it so that we could find and enjoy it also!