Bolt

Yes, it's definitely a kid's movie, but I had more fun than I expected seeing Disney's Bolt in 3-D on Tuesday evening. It's got cute characters & a great story that might even say something about the gap between one's self-perception & the reality.

The movie opens with a complex reflection in a store window that gradually becomes transparent to reveal the space inside. The movie is a showcase of these types of elaborate setting & lighting effects. In almost every scene I would spot some detail & be thinking, "Someone had to program that..."

It's also full of great character animation. Everyone's favorite character must be Rhino, the gung-ho hamster, rolling around in his ball, whose dialog is mostly made up of bad movie cliches ("It's a good day to die!"). There's even plenty of life in the realistically designed pigeons & the cartoonish movie studio staff. Actually, the pigeons provide hilarious spot-on parodies of New York, L.A. & Mid-West personalities.

I'm rarely up on the latest movies, so I was surprised by how many previews there were for animated films coming up in the next 6 months:

• The Tale of Despereaux (Universal)
• Ice Age 3 (Blue Sky)
• Monsters vs. Aliens (Dreamworks)
• Coraline (Laika) -- The art looks really interesting, kind of like Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• Up (Pixar)