It's strange to think that John Travolta hasn't stepped into the shoes of a big screen animated character until now. Given all of the Disney movies and advances in animation that have come down the pike since Travolta hit the Disco dance floor in Saturday Night Fever back in 1977, you'd assume one would have appeared on his resume. Although it makes for a great trivia question, Travolta has teamed up with head of Disney animation and Pixar founder John Lasseter to lend his voice to Bolt, a super hero German Shepherd TV action hero who realizes he doesn't have super powers and that his TV series isn't real. One of Hollywood's biggest A-listers, once the most popular celebs on the planet, Travolta also stars with new superstar Miley Cirus, who plays his young owner, Penny.

At the recent L.A. junket for Bolt, we were on hand at the press conference where John Travolta took a seat with the now legendary John Lasseter to educate journalists on why Travolta finally chose Bolt has his first animated feature role, singing with Miley Cyrus, the evolution of 3D, and how quality is the perfect business plan for a great movie.

I heard in Hairspray that you had a very long development process about your characters - how they walked, what they do, how different was it to do an animated character - and did you have to get in touch with your inner dog or your inner super hero?

JOHN TRAVOLTA: Fortunately, I’m already in touch with my inner dog. But secondly, it is a new process for me, or was a new process, and although I had done advertisement voice-overs as a kid - I did radio and television voice-overs and was very comfortable with a microphone - but I had not yet gone on the journey of discovering how animated features are put together. So really, our director here and his partner really helped me and guided me through this process, because to some degree it’s a leap of faith because you don’t have the other actors with you and you don’t really know what the animators are conjuring up as an end result. So therefore you have a bit of a ‘Take me there,' you know, ‘Show me the way and I’ll just give you a Chinese menu of options.’ So you do 15 to 25 versions of one sentence and then the animators, hopefully, like one of them, and they put it together. So that’s kind of it.

John, I want to ask you about Miley. You probably didn’t do a lot of voice recording with her, but how about the singing?

TRAVOLTA: We finally did the video where we sang together, but we had to sing our parts separately, like Frank and Barbara did on their duets. But we did do the video together where we sang together.

What was she like? I’m sure your kids are nuts about her.

TRAVOLTA: I was so popular when I got home after the news of doing a song with Miley. And doing a movie with her was big enough news, and singing and dancing with her was a whole other - You know, I can dine out on that for months. [laughs]

John, you’ve done a lot of different action movies in the past. Did you draw on any of the experiences in Face Off or Broken Arrow, because this is kind of like a bombastic action movie in some places.

TRAVOLTA: Yes, actually, I did. Because again, I wasn’t sure, and Chris was directing me, I wasn’t sure of how much of a reality to put [in]. Am I Clint Eastwood at some points? And I thought, ‘Well, maybe a little bit.’ Am I John Travolta in Broken Arrow or these other action movies - Face Off? And I thought, ‘Well, it’s an animated feature geared mostly towards young people so I can’t do the edgier stuff, but I can do a modified version of that.’ And then balance it with the naivety and the guilelessness, you know. So to some degree, yes. Yeah.

One of my outlets contacted me the other day and said, ‘Have you seen Tinkerbell?’ So here’s this grown man in the afternoon, alone having to watch this film Tinkerbell and all of a sudden I’m going, ‘You know what? This is pretty good.’ Now I noticed you have the same quality in this, as in Bolt, and I was wondering was there a time when you were thinking of having that as a theatrical? And why it didn’t go into theaters? And then also, what is this quality that’s able to catch the attention of children, but at the same time is holding onto adults?

JOHN LASSETER: It’s quality. [laughs] You know, quality is the best business plan. When I came in, it’ll be three years in January when they announced that Pixar and Disney were merging, and there were a number of projects already kind of in the works that I jumped in to work on. And Bolt had just gotten started, so it was one of the ones I really rolled my sleeves up and said, ‘I want to make great for the studio.’ But the same goes for Tinkerbell. I’ve always loved the character Tinkerbell, it’s been one of my real favorite Disney characters. There’s kind of a real spunk and sassiness to her, and I just love the idea that a fairy is small and they can fly. And the idea of 'Where did she come from and were there more fairies like her?', which originally came out of the Disney publishing. They did some really great books. It had great potential. I knew it had great potential for the company. But again, quality is the best business plan.

If you put out a bad movie, it’s not going to go anywhere. It’ll go for a little bit. But if you do a really good movie then it starts giving it legs and people will watch it again. My wife always said, ‘Make sure you make your movies not for the first time someone sees it but for the one hundredth time a parent has to suffer through it on video.’ And it’s so true. Honestly, it’s about the depth of the characters, the storytelling, and finding that true emotion. Walt Disney always said, ‘For every laugh there should be a tear.’ It’s about making things funny and having the humor come from the characters, but also it’s about the heart. And those kind of emotions, you expect the audience to feel those. I hate the movies where I feel like the filmmaker is saying, ‘Okay, be sad now. Okay, these are all of the tricks I’ve learned, be sad now.’ You don’t feel it. But if you get people invested in the characters and the journey that these characters go through, where you really like these characters and then you get them into true situations, then that’s where the true emotions come from. That’s why we’re really proud of Tinkerbell and I’m really proud of Bolt as well.

Do you know how many theaters it will open in 3D?

LASSETER: Over nine hundred, they’re adding them as we speak. I love 3D. I hope everybody gets an opportunity to see it in 3D. It’s the first we made here where it was conceived from the very beginning as a 3D film. We knew it would be seen in 2D as well as 3D. Disney has done two other animated films in 3D - Meet the Robinsons and Chicken Little - both of those were primarily made as 2D films and then a crew within the studio came in towards the end of production and made the 3D version. I love 3D. I made a short film at Pixar in 1989 called Knickknack in 3D and there were no theaters to see it in. I mean, it was zero. So I’m very excited. In fact, people have a hard time believing this, but the year before that in 1988 I got married and I did my wedding photos in 3D. So I’ve always loved 3D, and so to have theaters now all over the world popping up to be able to see 3D is very exciting. It’s very immersive and when you se this film in 3D you get sucked into the film that much more. I think starting with Up will be the first Pixar film in 3D and all of the computer animated films from here on at both studios will be 3D as well.

Can you talk a little bit about comparing voice work to live action work? Is it more demanding, less demanding? And growing up did you have an animated character you were partial to?

TRAVOLTA: Well, I’ll answer the second one first. One of my favorites was 101 Dalmatians, but I also liked Peter Pan. Those are probably two of my favorite animated features growing up. And as far as the differences, you only need your voice, really, except when the animators need a little help with expression. So sometimes they’ll film you doing your voice and you can add another layer there if you want to help them with certain personal expressions. But technically you really only need your voice and I learned that from actually doing TV ads when I was a teenager. I was on Broadway and the producer from Madison Avenue said, ‘John, you’re not on stage right now. I just need it from your voice, I don’t need it from your face.’ So I learned to just kind of focus on the vocal expression to give cadence and a different style there.

John, what was it that attracted you to the project in the first place?

TRAVOLTA: What led me to the piece was my good friends have done great animated features. Tom Hanks did Toy Story, Robin Williams did Aladdin, and I didn’t want to do an average - I was competitive in a certain way. If I’m going to do an animated feature, I’m going to do a great one. And Michael Eisner had offered me a couple and I didn’t quite think that they were there. And then finally Dick Cook called and said, ‘I think we got the one for you.’ And it’s going to be high end and I knew John [Lasseter] was involved, Miley was involved, and I thought, ‘Geez, this is starting to look like a really high end animated feature and maybe this is the one to say yes to.’

And when I read the script, although I couldn’t really imagine what it would end up like, because it’s all in the animator’s imagination, you have to take a bit of a risk and trust that it’s going in the direction that you want. So I thought, ‘I can play a dog with my eyes closed.’ People always compared me to a dog growing up. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or not [laughs]. I knew that they needed this other quality that Chris [Williams] was talking about, this kind of "guy that’s in action movies" vocal quality. And because I’ve done a slew of those I knew how to do that. Plus I knew how to be the side that was more of the heartbreaking side. So I knew I could help them, but it was whether it was the right one to do or not. I think it was.