Cars

Cars isn't just a step down from previous Pixar animated films. It's a full-on stumble. A failure on a basic, conceptual level. If the animation itself weren't so impressive (the backgrounds in get more realistic and detailed with each passing Pixar film), it would be unidentifiable as the work of CG animation's premiere studio.

An animated feature about self-aware, talking cars that race one another for sport is just a bad idea for a movie. I felt this way when I first heard that it would be the subject of John Lassiter's next Pixar film (the studio's final collaboration with Disney). Talking cars violate the Pixar formula, which tends to focus on invisible worlds that parallel our own human reality. In Toy Story, inanimate playthings share their own adventures when the children are away. In A Bug's Life, tiny insects struggle and fall in love silently under our feet. In Monster's Inc, the imaginary creatures of children's dreams work out of a factory filled with closet doors.

Brad Bird's debut with the studio, the phenomenal Incredibles, departed from the standard formula admirably, mainly due to its director's wit, creativity and unerring sense for story. Cars, on the other hand, just doesn't make a lot of sense.

We're asked to accept talking cars with humanoid faces driving around a world that exactly replicates our own, save for the total absence of any actual carbon-based lifeforms. I don't want to overthink this, but wouldn't a world built for and by cars look significantly different from a world built for and by humans? Why are roads so narrow if everyone's a car? Who is building all these cars? How come the cars have shelves and gas pumps and other tools requiring opposable thumbs?

I know this movie is for kids and not discerning, cynical adults, but I'm thinking that even children would question some aspects of this premise. It's one thing to have a plot device that doesn't stand up for post-movie scrutiny, but there's just cognitive dissonance going on in a film where cars own multi-story hotels. How are they getting up to the second floor?



Beyond the fact that it's nonsensical to have a world solely populated by manmade machines, the concept of Cars limits Lassiter and co-director Joe Ranft's ability to craft memorable characters. They throw in just about every recognizable 20th century automotive design, from Model T's to tow trucks to fire engines, but there's not as much variation in car models as, say, underwater life or monsters. It's as if Pixar generally chooses subjects with a lot of diversity, to allow for maximum colorful and interesting designs, but this time went with cars because Americans like 'em.

The plot is lifted directly from Michael J. Fox's '80s comedy Doc Hollywood. Race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), en route to the finals of the Piston Cup in California, accidentally rips up the main road through the near-deserted town of Radiator Springs. A stern local judge (voiced by Paul Newman) sentences him to painstakingly repave the road before leaving town, putting him in danger of missing the race entirely and losing his shot at eternal racing glory.

Of course, while in Radiator Springs, Lightning will learn that winning isn't everything and there's more to life than big contracts and endorsement deals and a whole lot of other messages that are entirely hypocritical coming from Walt Disney Studios. That kind of "message" stuff is par for the course in contemporary kiddie flicks, which don't so much suggest high-minded ideals to children as repeatedly hammer away at familiar bromides. That's not the problem.

Cars is just such a slack affair. None of the main characters really click this time out, despite the efforts of a large ensemble of mainly-talented voice actors. Only Jeremy Piven, riffing on his "entourage" role in a bit part as Lightning's agent, got any real laughs from me. George Carlin appears as a VW bug (which, of course, sounds like a hippie), Cheech Marin plays a lowrider (cause he's a Mexican!) and Tony Shalhoub plays a cheap Italian stereotype tire salesman, but none of them really has anything funny to work with. How can this be the same group that made the effortlessly hilarious and even insightful Toy Story 2?

Worst of all, some numbskull agreed to give a sizable role to the noxious Larry the Cable Guy, as the half-retarded tow truck Mater. The animators did a remarkable job in this case, because the character totally captures the shrill, obnoxious, semi-offensive and desperate schtick of the real Larry the Cable Guy. It takes ability to perfectly translate redneck-style ignorance into the realm of digital animation and I want to give credit where it's due.



I don't want to sound repetitive, but the writers were clearly hampered by the weak concept. How many fuel and exhaust jokes can you make within the confines of one film? Even so, Cars smacks of a lack of effort in terms of the material. (For example, Radiator Springs contains several businesses, but almost all of them sell fuel. There's a restaurant that serves oil and fuel, a hippie VW bus that sells "organic fuel," which I guess is supposed to be a play on organic food but which isn't even remotely funny, and so on. Couldn't they think of some more "car stores"? These kinds of punny alternate-reality jokes are Pixar's bread and butter.

It's a real shame the material doesn't work better because the animation, in typical Pixar style, is absolutely stellar. Despite the unfortunate focus on linear, car race-style action as opposed to the more broad and inventive set pieces in Monsters Inc or Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, many of the shots are still breathtaking in their attention to the small details of scenery, color and shading. Some of the desert shots look photorealistic, like actual footage taken from a car window of the arid world passing by.

But though it's uniformly terrific, my instinct tells me that Pixar's the biggest brand name in American film today because of its personality, not its technical acumen. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it's the programs allowing for the random movement of individual hairs on Sully the Monster that made Monsters Inc such a hit. It was the charm and likability of the scenario, the genial attitude and the impressive scope. And the jokes were funny! I really can't stress the importance of funny jokes enough in a comedy...