Cars (2006)

by Jerry Roberts

The genius of the animators at Pixar lies in their ability to draw life from a variety of the things around them. The films spun from their imaginations are told in the manner in which a child might imagine them, kids have the ability to give personalities to inanimate objects and the films of Pixar play out that way. Already they have drawn inspiration from toys, fish, monsters, bugs and superheroes and now they arrive at cars and once again, darn it, they've succeeded.

What is most noteworthy about Cars is the design because this film doesn't look like any film they've made so far. The look is crisp, it's shiny, even the rust on the broken-down wrecks have a certain beauty. An entire world has been created here balanced on the idea of a world populated entirely by living breathing automobiles. What generosity these animators have! What a visual canvas! There are cars of every size and discription, there are car jokes not just in the center but tucked into the corners of the screen. The design of the cars with their windshield eyes and bumper mouths are borrowed from Tex Avery's classic 1952 short "One Cab's Family" and are expressive even when we know they're getting an emotional payoff from a windshield.

The story focuses on a racecar named Lightening McQueen, a hotshot rookie on the racing circuit who has come out of nowhere to make it into the finals. He needs to win the big Piston Cup in California in order to break out of the humdrum mediocrity of hawking bumper polish and become the spokesman for a big-time oil company. After a beautiful cross-country montage, Lightening gets lost in the Nevada desert ending up the forgotten Radiator Springs a simplistic reminder of the glory days of Route 66 but it now a relic, a ghost town fading in the desert sun.

Lightening is sentenced and charged with tearing up the main road and has to perform community service by hauling a large, belching machine to resurface the road. The town mayer Doc Hudson assures him that the job will be done right and that it will take at least a week. The town is populated with an assortment of colorful car characters from Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), the town patriarch; Sally, a porche who came to Radiator Springs looking for a simpler life, a hippie van named Filmore, a Jeep named Sarge, a town elder named Lizzie who is . . . well, a Tin Lizzy. Lightening makes friends almost instantly with a slow-witted tow truck named Mater (Tow-Mater, get it?)

Every film like this must have a colorful sidekick and with Mater I think the animators have outdone themselves. He's a redneck towtruck, sweet, dumb but not offensive. Larry the Cable Guy takes his country stand-up routine and moves it to a completely new medium and it works beautifully and I believe that he is playing a role that years ago might have been occupied by Jim Varney or Andy Devine. Mater is one of the the great animated sidekicks in recent animation history and I think he'll be remembered for a long time.

The strength of the movie lies in it's visual texture and it's character invention. This is a beautiful film to look at, bright, colorful with a sense of wonder. It doesn't have the awe of Finding Nemo but in it's own way Cars creates a palette that is beautiful to behold. In the character invention the movie goes above and beyond to populate it's world with hundreds of different kinds of cars, racecars, Mini-Vans, tow trucks, Semis, RVs, tractors, forklifts and beetle-bugs. What Nemo did for fish this movie does for automobiles. In this way it sort of reminds me of Return of the Jedi in terms of the population of hundreds of different kinds of characters packed around the sides of the screen.

What I think Cars lacks is profundity. Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. all had an extra depth but Cars remains mostly on the surface. The point of the film (putting others before yourself) is a little more mundane. Maybe it's grounded in the fact that we are watching talking cars and it seems to keep us at a distance.

But that doesn't make Cars a bad movie it just means that when we are considering the personality of a toy or a fish it's much easier to connect than with a car, we're always aware that this is a four-wheeled talking vehicle and it's harder to make the leap in our imaginations. What it lacks in that department it makes up for in it's values. This is a movie that remembers a simpler time when character and responsibility were vitally important.