Man, what is it about cats in children’s media? Simon has lately discovered three or four more things with dogs in them. He’s scared of dogs in person and yet finishes sessions of watching Puppy Dog Pals by asking for a dog. Though at least the cat in that one just doesn’t like them and wants to be by herself. In most of these, the cats are actively evil. I’ve written about it before, but it’s been striking me anew lately with my renewed exposure to terrible children’s media. The cats in this one aren’t themselves evil, just somewhat malicious, but the ones in the show-within-a-movie are working with a supervillain.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a puppy who has been rescued from the pound. He believes that he is a superdog, modified by a scientist (Sean Donnellan) to serve as protector for his daughter, Penny (Miley Cyrus). He is not. It’s a TV show. Penny is an actress. And the director (James Lipton, of all people) has declared that they get more realism from the dog if he believes that he really is saving Penny from danger week after week. However, that gets a bit complicated when Bolt falls into a box and is accidentally shipped to New York. He must make his way home with the help of surly cat Mittens (Susie Essman) and credulous hamster Rhino (Mark Walton).

The trope of the fictional hero who believes himself to be real is not new to this movie. It wasn’t new to Toy Story. What matters is what you do with it, and this is a perfectly serviceable telling of that story. It’s not great; I feel as though there’s a reason this never comes up when people are talking about Disney. Because if you’re going to watch a version of the story, watch a good one?

For one thing, this is one of those movies where it’s clear that the leads were cast for their name recognition, not their skill as voice actors. It’s not that Travolta or Cyrus are bad, but his reads are kind of flat, and she doesn’t have much to work with. And doesn’t have the skill to rise above it. He was cast for the parents, and this was the height of her Disney fame. So here they are. I grant that we’ve gotten some fine performances out of name actors—Toy Story comes to mind here, too—but you need to be aware that voice acting is a skill that not everyone has. Even being a two-time Oscar winner doesn’t guarantee it, and Travolta is . . . not that.

The story is also kind of flat. Reading between the lines, they knew that they needed a certain level of emotional connection in the moment when Bolt figures out what’s going on, and they didn’t know how to get it. I’m not sure we got it here, but it’s better than some of the versions discussed in the IMDb trivia section.

There’s a lot of issues with abandonment in this movie. Okay, so Bolt wasn’t abandoned, though we do get into the prospect that no one minds that he’s gone. But Mittens was declawed and left on the streets, and that’s pretty awful. Even leaving aside the inherent cruelty of declawing cats—which involves basically amputating their fingertips—a declawed cat would be extremely lucky to survive on its own. The way cats behave in the wild—and for our purposes, the streets of New York are the wild—requires claws, and it’s only because this is a cartoon where a cat can be a hustler that Mittens is still alive to usher Bolt into reality.

But there’s the thing—early in the movie, the director gets horribly upset that there’s a boom mike in the shot, not because it’s bad for audiences but because it’ll give the game away to the dog. Never mind that it presupposes that a dog knows what a boom mike is; let’s consider that this is not exactly a canine Truman Show, where all the cameras are constantly hidden. If the boom mike couls be in the shot, the boom mike was somewhere the dog could have seen it during filming, and it presumably saw the cameras and so forth as well. If the dog knows what they are, the dog knows; if it doesn’t, doesn’t it wonder why they’re followed all the time and why suddenly he isn’t anymore?