Bolt, Disney Animation's upcoming 3-D computer-animated movie, is something new: the first production from Disney's traditional animation studio created under the stewardship of Pixar creative giant John Lasseter (Toy Story).
Lasseter, now the chief creative office of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, served as executive producer to directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard. And it was the creative process that Lasseter helped perfect at Pixar that informs Bolt.
Bolt stars the voices of John Travolta as the title character, a dog who thinks he's actually the super-powered canine he plays on TV, and Miley Cyrus as Penny, his "person." Susie Essman voices Mittens, a world-weary cat, and animator Mark Walton makes his acting debut as the voice of Rhino, an overenthusiastic hamster. When Bolt loses his way, Mittens and Rhino join him on a cross-country quest to rescue Penny.
Travolta, Essman and Walton joined Lasseter, Williams and Howard in a news conference at Disney studios in Burbank on Nov. 17 to talk about Bolt, which opens Nov. 21. Following is an edited version of the first part of the news conference; the second part runs on Wednesday.
John, what was your process to do a voice and get in touch with your inner dog or superhero?
Travolta: Fortunately, I'm already in touch with my inner dog. Secondly, it is a new process for me--or it was a new process for me. And although I had done advertisement voice-overs as a kid--I did radio and television voiceovers, I was very comfortable with a microphone--but I had not yet gone on a journey of discovering how animated features are put together. So, really, our director here and his partner really helped me, guided me through this process, because it's to some degree a leap of faith, because you don't have the other actors with you, and you don't really know what the animators are conjuring up as an end result. Therefore, you have a bit of a "Take me there, show me the way and I'll just give you Chinese menu options." So you do 15 to 25 versions of one sentence. Well, then the animators hopefully like one of them, and they put it together, so that's kind of it.
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Working with Miley, you probably didn't record your voice part with her, but how about singing the duet, "I Thought I Lost You," with her?
Travolta: We finally did the video together, where we sang together, but we had to sing our parts separately, like Frank and Barbra did, I guess, in the duet. But we did do the video together where we sang together.
What was that like? Are your kids nuts about her?
Travolta: I was so popular when I got home after the news of doing a song with Miley and doing a movie with her was big enough news. Then singing and dancing with her was a whole other [thing]. I can dine out on that for months. ...
Did you draw on any of your action movie experience from Face/Off or Broken Arrow, because this is like a bombastic action movie in some places?
Travolta: Yes, actually, I did, because, again, I wasn't sure. And Chris was directing, I wasn't sure how much of a reality to put [in] ... Am I Clint Eastwood at some points? And I felt, well, maybe a little bit. My John Travolta in Broken Arrow or these other action movies, Face/Off, and I thought, "You know, it's an animated feature geared mostly towards young people, so I can't do the edgier stuff, but I can do a modified version of that and then balance it with all the naivete and guilelessness." So to some degree, yes.
Williams: Like one of the things we were able to tap into with Bolt, I mean, a lot of the great roles that John has played, he's played real heavies, real tough guys, and he's always great. I think one of the reasons for that is that there is, if you don't mind me saying this, sort of innately likeable, genuine sweet side to John that always is there. And so I think we knew that he was going be the right guy to play Bolt.
Travolta: Balance it out, yeah.
John Lasseter, what is this quality that's able to catch the attention of children and hold onto adults?
Lasseter: It's quality. You know, quality is the best business plan. You know, when I came in, ... it'll be three years in January when they announced that Pixar and Disney were merging. There was a number of projects already kind of in the works that I jumped in to work on and help.
Bolt [then called American Dog] had just gotten started, so it was one of the ones that I really rolled my sleeves up and said, "This one I want to make great for the studio, for Walt Disney, the whole company, but also for this studio in particular, all the artists here." ...
If you put out a bad movie, it's not going to go anywhere. It'll go for a little bit. But if you do a really good movie, then it starts giving it legs, and people will like [to] watch it again. My wife always said, "Make sure you make your movies not for the first time someone sees it, but for the 100th time a parent has to suffer through it on video." It's so true. Because, honestly, it's about the depth of the characters, the storytelling and finding that true emotion. Walt Disney always said, "For every laugh, there should be a tear." It's about making things funny and having the humor come from the characters. But also it's about the heart. ... If you get people invested in the characters and the journey that these characters go through, where you really like these characters, and then you get them into true situations, then that's where those emotions come from. ...
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Bolt (left, voiced by John Travolta), Mittens the cat (Susie Essman) and Rhino the hamster (Mark Walton).
This is the first Disney animated movie that's like a Pixar movie. We've heard about the Pixar story development process and how that feeds into their quality. Did you bring that over or was it a completely different process?
Lasseter: First of all, a studio is not its building. A studio is its people. Pixar, the one thing we did bring from Pixar is this notion of making the studio a filmmaker-led studio, a filmmaker-driven studio.
What that means is, ... instead of an executive-led studio where the stories are thought of by a group of development executives, and a director is assigned to it, we instead go to the filmmakers--have faith in those filmmakers--and the stories come from them. And we all surround them with the other directors and story guys. We create a brain trust, and we're all very honest with them about their movie. There's no mandatory notes at this studio. So that philosophy has been kind of brought over.
But other than that, it's all the filmmakers here at this studio. We're like cousins. Every now and then, we'll take a film up to Pixar and show it to the brain trust up there, or the Pixar films will come down here and show it to the brain trust down here, but everything is kept very, very separate.
Howard: Anyone in the hallway, I think, in the studio now feels they can speak up about the movie, because they feel invested. They feel like anyone--if you're working at the studio--that's my film, too, and that camaraderie and, I think, that care goes a huge way in making a film. Especially when you're making a film on a tight schedule, as we were. Because we knew the film had to be great. We knew we wanted to, for John and for Ed [Catmull], who are running this place now, we wanted to make them proud of us and show them what we could do. And just the sense of pride that people have in a project is so much greater when you feel like you're listening to them. So that sense of open communication came with kind of the Pixar package. I think that's why the films are so great. They beat their stories up. They don't settle for just OK. They want to do something genuinely great.
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Bolt saves the day in his TV show within a movie.
Williams: Yeah, I would say that when people say, "This feels like a Pixar movie," we take that as high praise, of course. Maybe what they really are saying is that the characters really resonate with them. There's something very rich about these characters, and I think that only comes when you really open yourself up to criticism and when you take the notes and when you are willing to dispense with ideas and build something better. And that really all stems from John and Ed Catmull. I think that we all understood that this is John Lasseter's first Disney movie. We all understood that this had to be great, that this marks a new era now with John here. And so he's a very inspirational leader. I think everyone rallied around that idea of John being our boss, this being the first Disney film.
Lasseter: And it's interesting because Pixar films are made in the model of Walt Disney and the films he made. That's where these movies are absolutely for everybody. They have the humor, they have heart and they're very smart stories. When you do something right, as Steve Jobs always said, they could really last for a very, very long time. That's something he always talked to me about.
