Disney's Slate (Part I)

Bolt - November 26th, 2008


Bolt has got a lot of people in The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) on the edge of their seats for several very good reasons. This is the first theatrical release from Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) in which John Lasseter will stretch his wings as Chief Creative Officer. After John and other WDAS and Pixar directors were shown rough cuts of the working film they made several suggestions to the director Chris Sanders (of Lilo and Stitch fame) and when he wouldn't comply with the suggestions he was replaced by Chris Williams and Byron Howard. John Lasseter notes "Chris Sanders is extremely talented, but he couldn’t take it to the place it had to be."

This film has created new advances in non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) that has enabled animators to give the 3-D backgrounds a hand painted look (specifically based off the work of Edward Hopper). There are between three and fifteen patents pending for the new advances in the NPR technology WDAS created for use on Bolt. Sounds kind of like Walt and the invention of the multi-plane camera.... Could it be that WDAS is becoming an innovator again? We'll wait until the box office dictates how successful these new forays are - then we'll see how much The Mouse will let its animators innovate.

Disney's been opening pretty well with its less inventive films, take Chicken Little for example. At $40.1 million, it was the second largest opening in Disney [not Disney-Pixar] produced movies only to The Lion King's opening at $40.9 million. However, as opening weekend passed and the poor reviews came in, it quickly became apparent that Chicken Little had very little to stand on. Chicken Little made $313.9 million worldwide whereas The Lion King would go on to make $783.8 million.

I think Bolt will do well enough in theaters, as Disney's main audience of children and families is always a fairly dependable chunk of income, but teenage/college/older Disney fans still haven't been given a driving reason to go see this film. They've been burned before by the bad sequels and unimpressive low-grade animation pieces (Home on the Range? Kronk's New Groove?), and I think it's going to take something more to reclaim the audience that expects more from Disney's animated legacy.