Clearly, a computer-animated story about Bolt, a television superhero dog engaged in a trek across America with a super fan hamster, Rhino and a super cynical cat, Mittens, could not be construed as even slightly autobiographical for anyone behind the film. But in a way, for the executives, filmmakers and talent at the heart of Walt Disney Animation Studio’s upcoming release, “Bolt,” there is something that the onscreenanimals and off-screen humans share in abundance—ENTHUSIASM.

The zeal with which directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard discuss their feature film directing debut is palpable. Williams was hand selected by John Lasseter (Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and Principal Creative Advisor, Walt Disney Imagineering) to helm “Bolt,” given his talents clearly on view in Chris’ first CGI animated short, “Glago’s Guest.”

Williams felt an immediate and positive connection to the project. He remembers, “I felt that there was a great potential to create really rich characters—that’s sort of our overall goal as filmmakers. We thought we could come up with a trio – a hero dog, a cynical cat and a cheerful hamster — that the audience could spend a lot of time with. And I really feel that we did that. For me personally, I’m just excited to be working at Disney under John Lasseter—you really want to make a movie for him. He’s the best boss you could possibly have in animation. He’s very engaged and involved, and feels passionately about any film that comes out of Disney or Pixar.”

That passion for animation is also evident in the impressive career path of co-director Byron Howard, a member of Disney Animation Studio’s “Story Trust,” a hothouse group of artists creating and developing stories for the Company’s short and feature-length offerings. Howard’s keen sense of animation is put to superlative use in “Bolt,” where a painterly world is inhabited by fully-realized CG characters who feel right at home. Byron explains the rule for this successful combination: “Something that John really stresses is believability—the world you create doesn’t have to be realistic, but it has to be believable, and everything in that world has to obey its own logic. You can see within the animation of Bolt some actual dog mannerisms that have been captured—the more that Bolt gets away from his TV show in Los Angeles, the more he starts to act like a real dog. So the animation incorporates more ‘dog’ physicality. We watched video, we researched some of the dogs of classic Disney films, we brought in dogs to the offices and sketched them. And you can really see it in the character. That’s really gratifying to all of us.”

Bolt believes that he is a lucky canine with superpowers, which he actually doesn’t, but in the end, he finds that his belief and his acting on that notion is enough. In a way, just as the Disney artists do, Bolt becomes the dog, the hero, he always wanted to be by the action he takes.

Notorious charts the remarkable rise of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace – who, in just a few short years, shot from the tough streets of Brooklyn to the heights of hip-hop legend. Peeling back his mythic image eleven years after his tragic death, Notorious reveals the tumultuous and all-too-brief journey of a blazingly talented, fiercely determined young man whose unforgettable rap stories of inner city street life, with their raw truth and vivid rhymes, became emblematic of a whole generation’s brutal reality and its dreams of escaping it for something bigger.

The story follows the young Biggie (portrayed by Wallace’s real-life son Christopher Jordan Wallace as a youngster and Brooklyn rapper Jamal Woolard as an adult) from his surprising youth as a Catholic school honor student whose proud mother (Bassett) tries to keep him off the street corners to his years as a tough teenage drug dealer, and then to his life-changing move into young fatherhood, as his girlfriend Jan (Julia Pace Mitchell) gives birth to his daughter, prompting him to go on a mission to provide for his child by any means — legal or not.  But everything changes when a “freestyle” rap tape that Biggie created just for fun ends up with B.I.G. Daddy Kane’s DJ Mister Cee (Edwin Freeman), and eventually in the hands of ambitious rap impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs (Luke), whose marketing savvy and production genius transform Biggie into a cultural sensation almost overnight.

Now, with his career taking off into superstar territory, Biggie finds himself with “mo’ money, mo’ problems” and is under all kinds of new pressures.  His managers, Wayne Barrow (C. Malik Whitfield) and Mark Pitts (Kevin Phillip), attempt to keep the young man’s feet on the ground and mind in the studio, as he juggles the demands of recording, fatherhood and marriage to fellow Bad Boy artist Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) not to mention his complicated friendship with fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Kimberly “Lil’ Kim” Jones (Naturi Naughton) and the increasingly heated rivalry with West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie).

But just as Biggie starts to come into true manhood and solidify his musical legacy as the creator of one of hip-hop’s greatest bodies of work, fate has other plans.

Notorious is distributed by Twentieth Century Fox through Warner Bros.