Bolt

Chris Williams and Byron Howard’s 2008 animation follows Bolt, a dog who takes the television series he stars in for real life. It opens on a large action set piece, reveals minutes later that this is a shoot, and the spectacle ends there; the rest is a quiet road movie. It began as American Dog, developed by Chris Sanders after Lilo and Stitch. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, taking over Disney Animation after the Pixar purchase, rejected the story. Sanders was removed at the end of 2006, Williams and Howard installed in February 2007, and the film opened in November 2008: the rebuild took under two years. Lasseter also threw out the American southwest setting for sitting too close to his own Cars. The softness on screen is deliberate. The crew kept backgrounds painted rather than photoreal and published the method as a 2009 Siggraph paper built on painting terms such as massing and edge quality. The supporting animals are design decisions too: Mittens was written as the direct opposite of Bolt, and Rhino the hamster began as a rat. A good fit if you can sit down knowing the television episode never returns and the subject is a dog accepting he has no powers. Not for anyone who reads those deliberately unsharp backgrounds as a shortcut.