Bolt: A Review

Last week, I finished what was certainly one of the most unique books I’ve read this year: Mark Barrowcliffe’s The Elfish Gene. In it, Barrowcliffe shares his memories as a teenager in industrial England in the mid-70’s. Already a bit of a strange kid and a misfit, he discovered a new game, Dungeons and Dragons, and quickly it came to consume his life. He writes with a strong self-disparaging tone, dismissing the person that he was. While he understands that adolescents, and particularly adolescent boys are prone to obsessions, the world of fantasy and role-playing games was a kind of obsession that to his mind worked much destruction on his life. Uncomfortable with the person that he was (and what teenager isn’t) he threw himself into a fantasy world that was for him more real than than the real world.

With an entertainment culture that can’t quite shake the “reality TV” bug, we have seen a number of movies that have served up various levels of reflection on this notion of reality verses fantasy. Bolt stands in this tradition, a kind of Truman Show for kids. In it, we are introduced to our central character, Bolt, a dog who is the centerpiece of a popular television show. He stars as a dog with superpowers, charged each week with fighting evil and typically doing his best to save his owner, Penny. The trick is that the show has been elaborately designed to convince Bolt that he is this superdog, and so every aspect of his life is designed to convey the fiction. This is fine, until a series of events sets him loose in the real world, on a search for Penny, with no knowledge that he is in fact just a normal dog.

Since this is a Truman Show theme aimed for younger audiences, the level of reflection in the film is more muted, but even so, it is driving towards some worthwhile themes. Bolt eventually discovers what he really is, and so he must wrestle with anything of his old life was real, and particularly his relationship with Penny. I’ll leave the plot points aside, but as he goes on his journey in a way that serves up some worthwhile entertainment, we witness his growth in character as he embraces who he is even given his newfound limitations.

Watching it, I couldn’t help but setting the film alongside Barrowcliffe’s reflections in The Elfish Gene. Emerging from years of extreme devotion to roleplaying and fantasy (and trust me, D&Ders, this dude was weird by anyone’s standards!), he eventually carved out a fairly ordinary existence. Years later, he reconnected with one of those old friends, a gamer that he hadn’t seen in decades. As they got to know each other, he learned that after years of hard living, his friend had become a Christian and was now living a very different kind of existence.

As the agnostic Barrowcliffe considered his gamer friend turned believer, he mused on the connection. Perhaps (I paraphrase) the desire to spark the imagination is something needed for one to turn to faith. He writes with an outsider’s perspective, but as he does, I find myself resonating from the insider’s perspective. Indeed, the blessing of faith is largely a blessing of imagination, to conceive that the impossible can be possible, that the supernatural might engage the natural, that are hopes might become real because of a truth that, as Rich Mullins once said, “is too good to be real, but is more real than the air we breathe.”

And so I return to Bolt, who must come down to earth and realize that his life as a superhero was merely an illusion. What is left for him, though, is a kind of heroism that emerges because of a fierce devotion to those he loves, and a willingness to sacrifice himself for others. The marriage of imagination and vital relationship creates a kind of character that is winsome and inviting. For Barrowcliffe, he discovered the one without the other, and it proved destructive. We need both, and Bolt offers an entertaining reminder of that need.