Hacker Cinema
Bolt
2008 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Chris Williams, Byron Howard
AnimationFamilyAdventureComedy
Bolt is the star of the biggest show in Hollywood. The only problem is, he thinks it's real. After he's accidentally shipped to New York City and separated from Penny, his beloved co-star and owner, Bolt must harness all his "super powers" to find a way home.
3 positive7 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
What's Bolt? A search claims a ride sharing service, a Disney movie, and some shopping thing.
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output.
Disney Animation Studios rarely get a mention next to Pixar, but their 3D films are equally as good. Bolt, Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph, Big Hero 6, Zootopia...
Speaking as a former game reviewer, I think Disney's inability to enter the game market with quantifiable success is that they're still being reactionary.
Games are stories, regardless of how you look at them. They're either stories you're told or stories you tell. League of Legends is a story you tell so it's the originality of the game that makes it. Starcraft is a story you're told, and truth be told in the intervening years between the original and its modern iteration the gameplay is stale and generic it's been cloned a dozen times, but the modern iterations are still fun an playable.
So I think you're right. They just don't play games.
You see a change in Disney's movies when John Lasseter takes over. He took over prior to Meet the Robinsons release, and at his behest they scrapped over 60% of the movie. It was the first thing Disney had put out in a long time that was actually a good story, and it did it by shirking conventions. He scrapped what would become Bolt entirely. From then on everything just got better.
Why? Because Lasseter loves movies, he loves stories.
Square Enix manages to use Disney characters, but they're doing it in a massively unconventional way. So the characters themselves aren't an issue, it's the way they're used in games.
Disney puts out movie tie ins and the only game that was decently received was Epic Mickey and instead of solving its flaws and building on it they tanked it with #2 by falling into sequel mania.
Honestly Disney needs to find out what story it wants to tell and tell it through a game. They've got enough franchises under their belt that they could find a story that people want to hear - they've been doing it all the time with movies lately.
Disney isn't going to be original in game play. It's too big, it's too slow. The only way it can be successful is to tell a good story, and it just doesn't try to put even it's B-material into its games.
Starcraft 2 continued a great story. People don't play through a dozen near identical levels for nothing. They do it because it unlocks more story. It worked for Brood War. It worked for Mass Effect.
Fallout 1 and 2 are still the best games in the entire franchise because of how tight their story was. To highlight the power of a good story, TES fans still frequently call Morrowind the best game in the series. Most of the talk over Skyrim is good graphics and gameplay mechanics - lots of which were inherited from mods from Morrowind.
And the 2008 animated Disney movie: http://movies.disney.com/bolt
The word Bolt always has to have the lighting bolt in the "O".
Bolt (the Disney movie): http://cdnvideo.dolimg.com/cdn_assets/abd7aa3a4851f515796d9dc82ea263bdbfe62cfa.jpg
Bolt Browser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(web_browser)
Bolt [1] is an interesting choice as a major plot point is the shift between the real world and the movie within a movie story of the main character.
Within the film they use color-grading as the main means of indicating the switch and you can easily pick out individual scenes from the display.
1 - http://movies.disney.com/movies/bolt-4ba34c22e00d459e961b9666
I've been confused by Netflix's business strategy for a while. I'm not much of a business guy, so maybe I'm just missing something.
I've made do for movies with the channels that came along for the ride when I subscribed to the minimal cable TV package that got me the nerd channels (Science, Discovery, Nat Geo, History, and so on). I've got quite a backlog of movies I'm waiting for.
Recently, I caught a movie (How to Train Your Dragon) on TV that I liked so much that I simply had to go buy a copy on Blu Ray. This also necessitated buying a Blu Ray player. I picked a Blu Ray player that also plays streaming content from the internet and supports pretty much everything other than iTunes.
I then started researching the streaming services (both subscription and rental), seeing how well they covered the movies I'd seen in the last couple of months on TV (HTTYD, Star Trek, Kung Fu Panda, District 9, Watchmen, Shrek Forever After, Happy Feet, Tangled, Bolt, Despicable Me, Monsters vs. Aliens, Fargo, Fantastic Mr. Fox), as well as how well they covered movies still on my backlog, plus assorted movies I'd like to rewatch.
Here's what I found. Neither Amazon nor Netflix subscription streaming provided good coverage of the movies I'd recently seen, the movies on my backlog, or the movies I want to rewatch.
The streaming rental services were a bit better, but still missing a lot.
Netflix's disc subscription service, on the other hand, covered pretty much everything.
So here is where I get confused. Netflix seems to think their future is in their streaming subscription service. This seems to me to be a pretty risky basket to put all their eggs into, because it seems to me that Amazon will have an easier time fixing their weaknesses compared to Netflix than Netflix will have fixing their weaknesses compared to Amazon.
Amazon's weakness compared to Netflix is that Netflix apparently has more content (that's what people tell me, although for the movies I'm interested in they seem about the same). To fix that, Amazon just needs to make some licensing deals. They don't have to build out a lot of new infrastructure or enter a new line of business or anything like that. It's a "write a check" problem for them.
Netflix's weakness compared to Amazon is that Amazon subscription streaming is part of Amazon Prime--and there are good reasons to have Prime besides the streaming. I got it for the shipping savings, and I'm also enjoying the Kindle lending library. (Brick and mortar retailers, like Barnes and Noble, and Best Buy, seem to be doing their best to drive people to Amazon, and so I see Amazon Prime becoming more and more common--but this is best left for another rant).
This makes the question for a lot of people "Netflix in addition to Prime?" rather than "Netflix or Prime?". That's a much harder case for Netflix to make. As I said, for the movies I've checked there are very few on Netflix that are not on Prime--it would cost me less to simply rent those movies. As Amazon closes the gap on content, "Prime plus rental" will become a better choice than "Prime plus Netflix" for more and more people.
It seems to me that Netflix's best weapon against Amazon is their disc subscription service. It provides the most content (both recent and older). It provides the highest quality content. It provides extras (commentary, deleted scenes, and all the other nifty things that come on disc besides just the movie).
Yet Netflix treats their disc service almost as if it is an embarassment. There's no link on their main page for it. It only seems to be mentioned in their FAQ, where they imply that it is an add-on service to the streaming service, and give no link to details.
Just checked out the 2 sites. They don't seem to be active? The movies there seem to be dated.
Actually flixpulse.com classified some reviews wrong. Here are some of the "bad" reviews on "Bolt":
-- "Bolt" is bringing AWESOME back -- @seanbonner awesome! BOLT loves you back.
Whatever algo they use need some tuning. But I don't think anyone is actively working on it anymore.
Except even Pixar characters make the 'tude face. But I usually see that crapola only on box art.
One thing the investors didn't seem to notice is that the acquisition of Pixar seems to have spillover effects into the rest of Disney. With Lasseter in the driver's seat as Chief Creative Officer, their quality seems to have improved a tick. <i>Bolt</i> was an outstanding film, not <i>The Incredibles</i> great, but funny and fun to watch.