'Cars'

The week before ‘Cars’ came out, there was an article in the New York Times lauding Pixar’s (the company who made it) track record. Pixar, it said, was the only film company whose first seven films made over $100 million dollars; and if this weren’t enough, the company has retained an integrity and artistic sophistication revered throughout the film industry. At one point in the article, John Lassater, Pixar’s founder and the director of ‘A Toy Story’, ‘A Bug’s Life’ and ‘Cars’, says:

''After each film's opening weekend, we pass the pressure on to the next director,'' he said. ''Pete Docter did it to Andrew Stanton, Andrew did it to Brad Bird and Brad passed it to us. It's almost like we should deliberately put out something that isn't good, just to get it over with.''

It’s a silly quote in a promotional article and I would have laughed it off completely it’s wasn’t the stuff of hubris and even though the issue doesn’t bear as much weight as, say, a man killing his father and marrying his mother or stealing fire from the Gods, it made me wonder about such streaks and what make them end. Success on the $7.3 billion scale (the amount Disney bought Pixar for) can’t be an easy thing to handle and the pressure to live up to the excellence that came before can cause a man, or a company, to think and do strange things. Success ascends and failure descends and what goes up must come down and very few companies or people or sports teams or artists are able to sustain that level of success over an extended period of time.

The good news, for the pocketbooks at Disney, Pixar and the popcorn vendors at your local Cineplex, is that ‘Cars’, to date, has grossed over $200 million to pretty good reviews. The Cars are in Happy Meals and I’m sure the workers in Taiwan are sewing overtime so the shelves at The Disney Store ® and Wal Mart ® runneth over. I’m happy for Pixar though. They are a good company making interesting films who have worked very hard to sustain what they’ve achieved.

Still: because of the article and Mr. Lassater’s quote, I arrived at the film in a state of reluctance; but in the interest of giving the film a fair shake, and learning from my experience with ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (didn’t think you’d ever see these two films mentioned in the same article, did you?), I found my seat in the front row and settled in.

The first twenty minutes take place at a NASCAR racetrack and it is obvious from the start that the animators over at Pixar have done their homework with gusto: the stadium is enormous and bustling and seems to be a live creature. The cars gleam and hug curves, throwing off bits of track and rubber in their wake. (If you listen closely, you can hear the rubble crackle.) The film cuts from car to car, whirling around the action and includes an audio commentary from announcers, all cars themselves. The audience consists of cars too: all dressed cup and cheering and hoping and hollering. In fact, if you look around, every single character in the movie is a car (or should I say ‘Car’), from the pit crew to the announcers to the paper-hatted concessioineers and it took all of two minutes for my ten-year old mind to wonder how these cars procreate. Do they do it via assembly line like something out of ‘Brave New World’ of ‘The Matrix’? Do Mamma Car and Pappa Car go into the garage and exchange anti-freeze? How long do these kiddie cars gestate and is there a placenta? This being a PG movie my questions were bound to go unanswered but I was hoping for an inside joke, a wink to adults so prevalent in animated films these days. Alas: no such joke arrived. I was left to my own devices to wonder just what oil these Cars used to lubricate their pistons.


Our hero is Lightning McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson. He is winning the race but he almost loses it. Lightning McQueen has a problem you see: he’s brash, he’s arrogant, and thinks he doesn’t need anyone to succeed. He has grit, smarts and determination though and he salvages a three-way tie. This forces the finalists to travel cross-country for a Championship race. At stake is ‘The Piston Cup’ and untold endorsement dollars.

The road to the championship is paved with peril: After a series of accidents and, yes, hubris, he destroys the main street of, and finds himself incarcerated in, a small, forgotten town located off Route 66 (We later learn the town was thrown into obscurity when the construction of a highway causes commuters to just pass them by) Doc Hudson, the town judge, orders McQueen to repair the road and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at escape (reference ‘The Great Escape’ with Steve McQueen), he realizes the only way he’s getting to the Big Race in California is to repair the road. And while repairing the road, he befriends the towns-folk, gives the forgotten town some deserved Recognition, falls in Love, learns A Valuable Lesson and gets to the Big Race in time to Compete and find Redemption. The lesson he learns may have something to do with loyalty. Or community. Or the value of friendship. I wouldn’t know: I was too busy trying to keep my intestines in place.

‘Cars’ is not a bad film. The animation is extraordinary: full of obsessive detail done by people who know more than a little something about their subject. The characters are interesting and well suited to the cars they represent. (Larry the Cable Guy voices a hillbilly tow truck named Mater --“Like Toe-Mater, without the Toe” he points out; Paul Newman voices Doc Hudson, a sleek, classic 1951 Hudson Hornet; Bonnie Hunt voices Sally, a smart and pretty Porsche; and George Carlin voices a hippy-ish Volkswagon van who passes the time constructing conspiracy theories about government suppression of organic fuels and arguing with a rather militant jeep.) And it contains scenes so clever and imaginative I wanted to stand up and shout to make sure everyone in the audience understood they were witnessing greatness. (Check out Mater and McQueen’s tractor tipping scene; or McQueen’s one vehicle pit crew in the film’s climactic race).

But the film feels empty. One of Pixar’s strengths during its run has been to exploit 3-D animation technology to create worlds and tell stories. In ‘Cars’ though, they seem to have spent so much time on the visual details that they forgot to explore their chosen world and find a story within it. Our world, for example, contains highways, billboards, hotels, restaurants, auto-supply stores and gas stations. The world in ‘Cars’ consists of…highways, billboards, hotels, restaurants, auto-supply stores and gas stations. And with the exception of the hotels – each patron, after checking in, pulls into a garage with a nightstand – none of the above has been altered to accommodate its inhabitants. ‘Cars’ is the first Pixar film which didn’t need to be animated. Aside from the talking cars, they could have cast actors, scouted locations and told a similar story.

This is a shame because cars as a subject present such interesting possibilities: they are a vital part of our daily lives and the way we relate to them has a lot to say about who we are as people. I have a friend who runs himself and his car ragged (and his fuel tank empty) in pursuit of the perfect parking spot. And people seem more affected and vocal about rising gas prices than in a war that is partly the cause of that hike. This is not to say ‘Cars’ should be a political film. It would just be interesting to see an animated film about cars in which they react and relate to the things humans project onto them and make them do. Instead we are given a film in which cars act like people in a world that is strictly homo sapien. It’s not terribly inventive or insightful. It’s just a film on Cruise Control.