“I want a dog.”

That’s what my girlfriend said after I took her, against my better judgment, to Disney’s new animated dog movie Bolt. It’s also what she said as we were walking to the car afterward. It’s also what she said in the car on the way home. Each time, she scrunched her face into the kind of wide-eyed hopeful frown that I previously assumed only dogs themselves could pull off.

Yes, Bolt is predictably adorable. But now that I might be roped into buying my girlfriend a dog, was it worth seeing?

Of the top-tier computer-animated movies out there, Bolt is somewhere in the middle of the pack, better than some of the weaker Pixar offerings like Cars but nowhere near Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or the first Shrek. It’s super-cute, but there’s not much there.

The story: Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) is an ordinary dog who stars in a TV show, also called Bolt, about a dog with superpowers who protects his owner Penny (Miley Cyrus) from supervillains. Thing is, Bolt thinks it’s all real.

Okay, easy enough to understand. Unfortunately, instead of just letting us accept that, the movie goes to great lengths trying to explain why Bolt thinks the TV show is real: the show’s producers have decided he needs to think it’s real in order to get the best performance from him, so they film everything in one take, hide the crew and camera equipment, impeccably time the special effects, and lock Bolt in a trailer in between takes.

They really try to sell it, in other words, and of course the result is that it makes less sense than it would’ve if they had just glossed over it. He thinks it’s real? Fine. He thinks it’s real because he’s living out a painfully convoluted version of The Truman Show? Thanks, but we don’t need to know.

Anyway, after filming a cliffhanger episode in which Penny is kidnapped, Bolt is so riled up that he escapes the set, determined to rescue her. That lands him in the real world, where he travels across the country but slowly realizes he doesn’t actually have any superpowers.

It’s all pretty simple and shallow, but colorful, fun, and regularly funny enough to make it feel worth it. The only character with any depth is Bolt’s main sidekick, a stray alley cat named Mittens. I’ve traditionally liked dogs better than cats, but between Bolt and Mittens, there’s no contest. As voiced by Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Susie Essman, Mittens really has a soul. After years of abandonment and loneliness, watching her slowly let her guard down is darn near poignant.

Of course, there’s also a super-hyper, delusional gerbil along for the ride who provides some serious comic relief.