Ethanol Daze

John Lasseter and Pixar hit the road again with "Cars."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside:  Zoom-zoom.

The Downside: Running on a leaner mixture than you'd expect.

    "I'm in hillbilly Hell!" Lightning McQueen screeches.  Lightning is actually a racecar- a cocksure hot rod on his way to California to, hopefully, become the first rookie in history to win the coveted "Piston Cup."  But due to some complications along the way (not the least among them the fact that Lightning, being a racecar, has no real headlights- just stickers) ends up in the small, dust-off-the-boots town of Radiator Springs.  In pure animated feature fashion, this hole-in-the-wall town features an amusingly eclectic box of local color characters, all of whom are keeping Lightning chained to the yoke of "Bessie," a giant Terry Gilliam-style paving machine as part of community service for ripping up the only road in town.

    There used to be a time Pixar had the arena of computer animated features all to itself.  No more.  In the last three months we've seen a deluge of entries in an art form that the company first pioneered and mastered and, more and more, it is looking like Pixar is getting lost in the rush.  It's latest entry, Cars, is much, much better than Ice Age 2 (of course, getting stuck in the concession line waiting on a very, very slow drink machine would be better than Ice Age 2) and goes for more soul than the four-to-the-floor animation-as-amphetamine sub-genre Dreamworks has cultivated in Madagascar and Over the Hedge.

    I think- no, wait, I know it's unfair to hold Cars up to this kind comparison.  Let me make this perfectly clear from the get-go: Cars is a very good movie.  Like all of Pixar's work it is meticulously crafted and has an uncanny knack for ingenious voice casting for its rogues gallery of characters.  However, Pixar rose to fame on the shoulders of an incredibly strong body of masterworks like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, which has raised the bar for all of their work to an impossible level, making even enjoyable, well-done pieces like Cars feel like a little bit of a let-down.

    But enough of that.  Lightning, of course, is a little less than enthusiastic about his new circumstances.  Even though he's drawn the attention of the town dream car, a spit-shined Porsche named Sally, he's also inherited the ire of Radiator Spring's patriarch- Doc Hudson (a match-made-in-Heaven Paul Newman), a crotchety cynic whose disdain for Lightning may involve more than typical AARP bluster.  Doc has plenty to be wary about, though- Lightning is an arrogant little cad, a role perfect for Owen Wilson's slick, surfer-dude persona.  In the opening bookend race we watch him drive his pit crew to quit after boasting that he's a "one man team."  He's in competition with Chick Hicks (unrecognizable Michael Keaton) for a corporate sponsorship deal that'll give him primo exposure, an entourage, and even his own private helicopter.  Both cars are chomping at the bit to take this grand prize away from the reigning Piston Cup king (voiced by NASCAR uber-legend Richard Petty), who may actually have a thing or two to teach Lightning about there being more to life than winning.  In fact, Lightning is up for a lot of lessons, either from Doc, Sally, or the naive but trusting town tow truck, Mater (Larry the Cable Guy, who is now forgiven for that turd of a movie called Health Inspector he put out a few months back).

    Cars' wit is well-crafted (guess what, kids... tractor tipping!), but falls short of the maniacal franticness of much of Pixar's early work.  This is definitely Pixar in lower gear, at a more sedate pace.  Radiator Springs used to be a boomtown in its heyday, a popular cross-country stop that has begun to fade since an interstate bypass took its business ten miles down the road.  The story scores well at infusing the town with a melancholy sadness (a hippie-ish Volkswagen van is positive every third blink of Radiator Springs' only caution light runs a little slower) and since slowing down to smell the roses is on the Moral Lesson of the Day menu, much is made of just drinking in the environment.

    And if Cars excels anywhere, it is in its artistry.  Even infused with their comic exaggerations (gotta love the whole windshields-as-eyeballs concept), the models in Cars are valued specimens of both detail and texture.  During the races that cap both ends of the movie, I was astonished by the realistic use of light reflections off metal and chrome and the fluid camera which could move everywhere with impeccable ease.  When the story moves into the desert it doesn't lose a bit of the visual wonder- the cactus and brush look alive and there's still plenty of "throwaway" detail to take in, like the giant "RS" painted on the bluff overlooking the city.

    I don't want to sound too much like a glass-half-empty kind of person.  I loved director John Lasseter's original work with the Toy Story films and A Bug's Life, so hopefully I can be forgiven for being just a tad nostalgic.  There is much pleasure to be taken in from a movie like Cars- it's personality, it's humanity, and the way it is another step in a technological evolution without sacrificing its soul.  It's a minor success for a group of people who made their mark with large ones, which is okay.  Every once and a while you have to trade in a Cadillac for a smaller, more comfortable model.  B

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