Deep Dive Pixar: Wes Looks at Cars

Welcome ladies, gentlemen and alternatively gendered individuals to Cars, the film I believe to be one of the biggest black marks on Pixar’s otherwise spotless record. Yes, I make it no secret that I do not hold this movie in especially high regard. While admittedly, I do have a certain appreciation for it as my very young nephew loves it so much and I very much enjoyed watching the film with him, the film itself leaves much to be desired. They say that bad is the absence of good, and while I agree with that sentiment to a certain extent, I’d like to amend that statement slightly. Bad is not the absence of good, it’s the absence of the effort to be good. Let’s use Sleeping Beauty as an example. If you recall, I referred to that film as “an appropriately titled snooze fest.” A bit harsh, maybe, but I stand by it. However, the film clearly had effort put into it and to this day remains one of Disney’s most memorable and visually stunning films. The effort is clearly on the screen. Now let’s look at the Pixar films that came before. Each of them were all extremely creative in their own way. Most would take the world we inhabit and either add a fantastical element or make the world seem more wonderous by showing it from the perspective of other beings. Cars on the other hand, it’s just our world but with talking cars instead of humans. Why that’s an issue I hope to elaborate upon in the body of the article, but for now, my biggest problem with Cars is that, for the first time it feels like the effort is not on the screen. It really feels like the filmmakers were only looking to create something marketable rather than something of true quality and the results are less than satisfying. Anyway, let’s get on to the story. Lightning McQueen is a racecar having an absolutely stellar rookie year, so much so that he’s considered one of the heavy favorites to win the coveted Piston Cup. McQueen is certainly not without talent, but he is also a cocky jerk, treating everyone around him like dirt and caring only for winning so he can get better sponsors and feed his own already enormous ego. McQueen’s big race for the Piston Cup ends up being a three-way tie with a tie-breaker race to be held in Los Angeles in one week. Due to a series of mishaps on the way to LA (many of which were his fault), McQueen ends up getting arrested and sentenced to community service in a small town along Route 66 called Radiator Springs. While at first, McQueen wants nothing more to get the hell out of this hick town, he eventually does start to bond with some of the citizens, notably, a hotel owner named Sally, a rusty tow-truck named Mater and a reclusive former racing star named Doc Hudson. It’s not one of Pixar’s best, but let’s look at Cars anyway.

Main Character:

Yeah, there’s no two ways about it, Lightning McQueen is an asshole. He’s a jerk to everyone he comes across, even those he relies upon like his pit crew or his sponsors. Everything he does is in service of his own ego. Lightning thinks he’s god’s gift to racing and anyone who says otherwise, even if they’re trying to give him some friendly advice is completely ignored if not flat out insulted for their troubles. Lightning is one of those characters who places winning above all else. Admittedly, he does start to soften up once he bonds with the townsfolk of Radiator Springs, but even then, it takes a while and before then, he tries to bolt first chance he gets. Lightning is voiced by Owen Wilson. While I’ve made plenty of jokes at the expense of Wilson’s acting ability in the past, he actually does a perfectly serviceable job with what he has to work with, which honestly isn’t muct. I will freely admit that Lightning does eventually learn his lesson which is more than I can say for a few characters we’ve covered in the past, but the problem with McQueen isn’t so much that he’s a jerk, but rather that he’s a cliché character that I’ve seen done better in so many other movies.

Villain:

There’s barely anything to say about Chick Hicks. He’s barely a presence in the film and when he is there, he’s essentially just a worse version of Lightning who’s willing to go just a little bit further in order to win, sometimes resorting to cheating when it suits him. He’s a bully and a scumbag and that’s pretty much where his character begins and ends. Shame because Chick is voiced by the amazing Michael Keaton and Frankly, the man who gave us such unforgettable characters as Batman, The Vulture and Beetlejuice is completely wasted as this generic douchebag character. I do appreciate that he actually ends up winning the Piston Cup at the end but the film frames it as a bad thing, but that’s kind of all this character has going for him.

Side Characters:

I’ve never been a NASCAR fan, but I still appreciate that this movie about race cars features cameos from a few famous race car drives such as Dale Earnhardt Jr., Mario Andretti and even getting Richard Petty to play McQueen’s other primary rival, Strip “The King” Weathers.

As far as other characters go, there’s quite a few of them, but not as many are as vital to the story as you may think. Still, it was cool to have some minor roles from some pretty likable celebrities including Tony Shaloub playing a Fiat 500, Cheech Marin playing a tricked-out lowrider and my personal favorite, George Carlin as a 60’s hippie van.

The Ms. Sally character was perfectly fine and Bonnie Hunt did a great job, but she just felt like a painfully generic love interest character. Honestly, part of me wishes Mater’s joke about Sally and him being an item turned out to be true. It would have at least been a nice subversion of things in this horribly predictable film.

That leads us nicely into Mater, voiced by *sigh* Larry The Cable Guy. Now look, I know that Daniel Lawerence Whitney, better known by his stage name of Larry The Cable Guy is one of those individuals whose presence in a creative work has become synonymous with low quality and that reputation is not entirely unfounded. However, and I’m not completely proud to admit this, when I was a dumb teenager, I used to be a big Larry The Cable Guy fan, even going so far as to dress up as him for Halloween, do my Larry The Cable Guy impression around the campfire at the family reunion and even paying actual money to see Health Inspector in theaters. To Larry’s credit, his standup is actually kind of funny in a very lowbrow sort of way and going by everything I’ve read about the guy, he seems like a mostly decent human being. And truth be told, while Mater can be a little annoying at times, he’s actually not really all that consequential to the plot and his friendship with McQueen is mostly harmless if not a little cute. Why this translated into him being the main character in the next movie I’ll never know but Mater is honestly the least of this particular movie’s problems.

The last side character I’d like to talk about is Doc Hudson, a reclusive retired race car trying to live a life out of the spotlight in radiator springs voiced by the late Paul Newman in what would be his final film role. Once known as the Fabulous Hudson Hornet, (which, according to my research, was the name of a real-life race car with a similar history) Doc became disillusioned with the racing world after he survived a horrific crash and now despises every reminder of it, hence why he’s so openly hostile towards McQueen. I actually appreciate his philosophy that the trophies he’s won are little more than empty cups, which serves to help McQueen understand what’s really important. I just wish that Doc got a little more screen time to develop his relationship with McQueen. When he shows up at the end as Lightning’s new crew chief, it feels like a one eighty since only a few minutes ago we saw him literally force McQueen out of town.

Songs:

Alright, I don’t like this movie, and while I don’t have the same weird revulsion for country music that other people seem to, I still wasn’t completely feeling the country heavy soundtrack. However, because I’m not made of stone, I did enjoy the song Our Town, simply because there isn’t enough cynicism in the world to make one hate James Taylor. It’s actually kind of bittersweet, seeing the town of Radiator Springs in full swing before a bypass was built that stopped it from being a regular stop for those traveling down route 66. James Taylor was absolutely the perfect choice for this scene. His melancholy tones really add a lot to the tragedy of the scene.

Memorable Scenes:

There’s only one actual scene I’d like to discuss and that’s the race between Lightning McQueen and Doc Hudson. It’s a brief scene and Doc doesn’t even bother actually racing, but it was nice to show just how well Hudson understood McQueen’s cocky attitude and using it against him.

Story:

As I’ve made clear at this point, this is a story that you’ve seen a million times. A cocky selfish athlete is made humble and learns that there’s more to life than being the best. You don’t have to watch cars to have seen it a million times. It’s cliché, it’s uninteresting and it adds nothing new to the conversation. Instead, the thing I’d like to discuss here is how the world of cars simply doesn’t work. Let’s look at other Pixar films that have come before. In the case of finding Nemo or A Bugs Life, the world presented is our world, just from the perspective of other creatures that inhabit it. The characters are humanized to a degree to make them more relatable but just different enough to be engaging. The worlds within our world are fully fleshed out and beautiful. Same thing with Toy Story only with the added fantastical element of toys comic to life when humans aren’t around. Once again, this world being fully fleshed out in terms of how it works, even if it’s a bit horrifying if you think about it too hard. Let’s take that a step further with Monster’s Inc. and our last Pixar outing, The Incredibles, both of which take place in worlds familiar to our own, but with supernatural elements added to them in the form of monsters and superheroes respectively. Once again, these worlds, how they function and the colorful characters that populate them feel fully developed. Now let’s look at Cars. All we have here is a world where we have Cars in place of humans. How does this world work? Why are all the vehicles in this reality sentient? Who built them? How do they build houses and places of business if they don’t have hands? If gasoline is their food, why do they have teeth? The answers to these questions are never given and we’re just supposed to roll with it. However, I think the real problem here is that the filmmakers weren’t trying to make something great like all those other movies I mentioned, they were trying to make something marketable. Now, I know that you can argue that that’s the point of literally every film we’ve discussed for Deep Dive Disney, and while I find that to be an overly cynical mindset, it’s not entirely wrong. However, most of the time, you can at least argue that Disney and Pixar put forth effort to make a quality product to make that money. Here, it’s hard to argue that that’s the case. This whole idea just feels like a slapped together cash grab that would make money regardless due to the Pixar name that exists only to sell toys. Now look, creating IP’s with the intent of toy sales is nothing new, trust me, I grew up with Power Rangers, but it’s no excuse not to put effort into the on-screen product.

The Dark Disney Factor:

Well, there’s a scene early on where a car’s jaw falls off. That was a bit unsettling. Actually, there’s a surprisingly weird emphasis on car tongues in this movie. McQueen is often seen sticking out his tongue in a similar manner to Michael Jordan hitting a slam dunk and he even ties in the race in the beginning by Sticking out his tongue. Weird. Other than that, not much. There’s a large combine harvester named Frank with the attributes of a bull that I can see little kids finding frightening. My nephew never was though. Actually, he used to do a cute little dance during that scene for whatever reason. Good times.

Final Thoughts: To use an automotive term, Cars is a lemon. A shoddily constructed product that appeals only to the lowest common denominator. The fact that in the time it took us to get a sequel to The Incredibles, this film got two sequels, a spin off film and a sequel to that spin off film is frankly infuriating. It's not anything offensive and if you have small children this is a perfectly serviceable film for them to consume, but if you're an adult looking for a deeper experience, you're not going to find it here. Well, enough of this crap, next time it's more Pirates of the Caribbean! Drink Up Me Harties, Yo Ho!!