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"But a lot of the time it's just the tiniest bit dull with no decent gags or songs, and the score is heavily reliant on singing cover versions of Route 66. Naturally the animation is top-of-the-range, but an awful lot of mega-bytes and laptop hours have been lavished on the frankly uninteresting spectacle of those zillions of almost identical little car spectators in the stadium, their flashbulbs twinkling. The car-creatures zoom by impressively enough but there are very few point-of-view shots from the racing cockpits. Perhaps Lasseter thought this would make it look too much like a video game, or that it would allude too directly to the actual danger inherent in real-world racing. But it would have injected some much-needed excitement. And there really aren't any villains: apart from one swaggering car-competitor who isn't all that mean. One of his stickers reveals a sponsor called HTB, or Hostile Takeover Bank - not a masterpiece of clever scriptwriting. Needless to say, there appears to be a strict ban on cigarette advertising for these race meets."

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One of the recent big smashes from animation wizards Pixar, the oceanographic fish comedy Finding Nemo, had a bit of an environmental theme to it. This new digi-spectacular is, however, very much not encumbered by politically correct worries of this kind. It is set in an airless imaginary world of cutely anthropomorphic vehicles who, like the toys or fish or bugs of previous adventures, have minds and quirkily differentiated personalities of their own. The difference here is that there are no humans from which their quasi-human identities are a secret: the cars have no drivers, and the teeming crowds at the racetrack are cars too. It's all cars.

The movie is a cheerful celebration of the lovable automobile, and particularly a fondly imagined golden age of motorvatin' on the open road: heading out west on Route 66, and encountering the kind of authentic smalltown America that is getting economically and culturally starved by the soulless interstate highways built to bypass these communities. Owen Wilson voices Lightning McQueen, a snappy, zappy young sports car planning to win the all-important Piston Cup on his very first professional outing. His name may or may not be in homage to Steve McQueen: movie actor and speed king. Lightning is preparing to race two fierce rivals at the gigantic meeting in Los Angeles, but on the way there finds himself marooned in a tiny, sleepy little town called Radiator Springs, populated by hick cars with various wacky voices, and naturally learns life lessons about how smalltown values are best. This is a lesson traditionally promoted in Hollywood movies - written, produced and performed by people who couldn't wait to get away from their dullsville home towns and head for the LA dream factory.

Wilson's co-star is Paul Newman, another famous real-life racer from the movies voicing a grumpy old 1950s car called Doc Hudson, who turns out to be a famous race star from half a century back and who, in spite of himself, begins to mentor hot-headed young Lightning and teach him some old-school racing moves. Lightning's fast-talking agent was originally voiced by Jeremy Piven from, among other things, TV's The Larry Sanders Show, but for the UK release this character has been awkwardly dubbed in by leading local petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson.

There are a couple of nice touches, including a subliminal depiction of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appears as a talking Humvee. There's a lachrymose fire engine who is forever turning on the waterworks, and tractors in the surrounding fields, lowing like cows. But a lot of the time it's just the tiniest bit dull with no decent gags or songs, and the score is heavily reliant on singing cover versions of Route 66. Naturally the animation is top-of-the-range, but an awful lot of mega-bytes and laptop hours have been lavished on the frankly uninteresting spectacle of those zillions of almost identical little car spectators in the stadium, their flashbulbs twinkling. The car-creatures zoom by impressively enough but there are very few point-of-view shots from the racing cockpits. Perhaps Lasseter thought this would make it look too much like a video game, or that it would allude too directly to the actual danger inherent in real-world racing. But it would have injected some much-needed excitement. And there really aren't any villains: apart from one swaggering car-competitor who isn't all that mean. One of his stickers reveals a sponsor called HTB, or Hostile Takeover Bank - not a masterpiece of clever scriptwriting. Needless to say, there appears to be a strict ban on cigarette advertising for these race meets.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Cars, but nothing very much right either, certainly not considering everyone's sky-high expectations of Pixar, and almost every hi-tech animation that comes down the pipe. The awful truth is that we are becoming blase about animation technology that just a few years ago would have had us on the floor, gasping. Now these movies are having to rediscover the old verities of script and voicework, which incidentally helped to make Pixar's The Incredibles such a wonderful film. On this front, Cars just doesn't have much in the tank, though Newman's character is droll and personable - a voice role that faintly recalls his reprised performance as "Fast Eddie" Felson in The Color of Money, the ageing pool hustler coaching callow Tom Cruise.

There is a rather flavourless self-satisfaction radiating from each highly worked pixel: the movie actually has a little homage to its own greatest hits like Toy Story and A Bug's Life, with the characters being played by cars - those were terrific films, of course, but it's a little smug to award classic status to yourself quite so publicly. Cars is such a luxurious and professionally engineered piece of entertainment, that this almost doesn't matter. It's unobjectionable enough, despite the naivety of using cars to complain about American culture being despoiled by new roads. But watching Cars is like being taken for a ride in a shiny new Lexus. Smooth, but bland and forgettable.

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Peter Bradshaw: Cars just doesn't have much in the tank.

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"If Cars is heavy on hooey, it’s also genuinely endearing. The story is polished to a farewell, and the filmmakers have a few surprises up their sleeves. Refreshingly, neither of the big races that bookend the film ends the way formula would dictate. Cars doesn’t just mouth the platitude that winning isn’t everything; respect, dignity and loyalty are really honored above finishing first."

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Directed by Pixar honcho John Lasseter, who helmed Pixar's first three films (the brilliant Toy Story films and the lackluster A Bug's Life) but hasn't directed since, Cars ominously recalls some of the elements that made A Bug's Life the most pedestrian and uninspired project in Pixar's filmography. The total absence of human beings, for one thing. And a formulaic story of a threatened community pulling together to overcome adversity.

Happily, Cars is no A Bug's Life. Offbeat and counter-intuitive, Cars finds a quirky creative groove and an emotional center that eluded the earlier Lasseter effort. The story of a callow young rookie racecar named Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) whose rise to the top is sidetracked by an unplanned stopover in a sleepy time-forgotten town may be formulaic, and on first viewing the first forty minutes or so - especially to an automotive non-enthusiast like me - seems a bit shaky. But the film's sense of time and place, its 1950s small-town nostalgia, its jaw-dropping visual beauty, and its love of cars, the open road and the American Southwest ultimately elevate Cars to a level of art and entertainment that continues to defy even the best efforts of Pixar's competitors.

Perhaps the film's biggest risk is creating a automotive parallel universe without drivers - a world in which fixtures of 20th-century Americana, from NASCAR racing to the forgotten towns and mom-and-pop shops of Route 66, exist independently of human beings or indeed any animal life forms. In this world, if you squint at the flies buzzing around light fixtures, they turn out to be little VW Bugs, and tractors stampede like cows - and are subject to nocturnal tipping by rural pranksters. Even buttes and cloud formations in the background reflect the film's autocentric milieu, with fin-tail and hood-ornament shapes cropping up everywhere.

The absence of drivers is reflected, almost literally, in the character design of the cars themselves, specifically in the placement of the eyes. Animated anthropomorphic autos (e.g., Speed Buggy) often "see" with their headlights, but in a driverless world it would be odd to see through the windshield into the empty driver's seat, and so the windshields in Cars are transformed into the whites of enormous conjoined eyes.

Why does the absence of humans matter? The non-human worlds of the Toy Story films and Monsters, Inc. provided an emotional point of entry for viewers precisely by imagining how toys and monsters would feel about us, thereby holding up a mirror to our feelings about them. Had Cars developed the automotive side of the driver-car relationship, that might have been an intriguing way of tapping into the great American love affair with the automobile; but the filmmakers haven't gone that route.

Without drivers to care about, what motivates a vehicle? As you might expect, it's the same things - or rather, the same range of things - that motivate their human counterparts.

Take Lightning McQueen, who has come out of nowhere to be a spoiler for the Piston Cup. Like any brash, callow up-and-coming young athlete feeling his oats, McQueen is hungry to topple the big guys at the top - and to enjoy the rewards of celebrity, notably a lucrative new endorsement deal with Dinoco Oil. (Dinoco, the name of the gas station where Woody and Buzz fell out of Andy's mom's car in Toy Story, is one of numerous Pixar in-jokes.) Arrogant and self-centered, McQueen isn't exactly a team player, and has little loyalty either toward his pit crew or his slightly stodgy current sponsor, Rust-eze, with its unglamorous clientele.

There's also McQueen's competition: classy reigning champ The King (voiced by racing icon Richard Petty), a 1970 Plymouth Superbird who'd like to retire in a (hopefully metaphorical) blaze of glory; and The King's longtime rival, perennial runner-up Hick Chicks (Michael Keaton), who's even more obnoxious than McQueen. Off the track, McQueen's easygoing transport bigrig Mack (Pixar veteran John Ratzenberger) is content to haul the sporty racecar from race to race, and may be the closest thing McQueen has to a friend.

However, contrary to McQueen's expectations, the most significant chapter in his life - and the heart of the film - takes place not on the racetrack or in the spotlight, but far from the beaten path of the Interstate, in the one-light town of Radiator Springs in Carburetor County. Once a prosperous rural community on the Route 66 thoroughfare from Illinois to California, Radiator Springs shared the decline of many similar towns that were bypassed by the new Interstate system.

For McQueen, Radiator Springs is the capital of nowheresville. He wants nothing to do with it or locals like gruff, no-nonsense Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), Mater the tow truck (comedian Larry the Cable Guy), and the businesslike Sheriff (Route 66 historian Michael Wallis), although he may make an exception for a sweet little Porsche named Sally (Bonnie Hunt). Of course circumstances contrive to keep him in town, and of course McQueen slowly learns that he's misjudged the town and its inhabitants, not least Doc Hudson, as in Hudson Hornet, of 1950s stock-car fame.

The plot elements are familiar and somewhat corny, most overtly resembling the 1991 Michael J. Fox comedy Doc Hollywood. But Cars has a specificity that goes beyond the lip service to small-town values typical to such films. It's a heartfelt elegy to a lost culture, an almost mythic part of America's past.

The Eisenhower-era nostalgia may be heartfelt, but it's not entirely convincing. After all, it was Eisenhower who signed the Interstate Highway Act that doomed Route 66 and its small-town culture. Cars romanticizes the local feeling of a road that turned and wound "with the land" rather than cutting across it - conveniently overlooking the fact that those turns and bends cost lives, earning sections of the highway the moniker "Bloody 66."

By contrast, the Interstate is disparagingly said to save drivers only "ten minutes of driving time," but multiply the number of drivers per year by the time and fuel saved, and the benefit seems appreciable. Painful as it may be to watch communities decline, the answer, if there is one, isn't not building better roads.

If Cars is heavy on hooey, it's also genuinely endearing. The story is polished to a faretheewell, and the filmmakers have a few surprises up their sleeves. Refreshingly, neither of the big races that bookend the film ends the way formula would dictate. Cars doesn't just mouth the platitude that winning isn't everything; respect, dignity and loyalty are really honored above finishing first.

Mater the tow truck (Tow Mater, get it?) is funny and sweetly personable, and Newman's Doc Hudson has real dignity and quiet authority. And, while praising the visuals in CG cartoons has become commonplace, Pixar's work here goes beyond eye-popping realism into stunning beauty. This isn't just technique, it's art. The sprawling landscapes in Cars are even more gorgeous than the colorful coral-reef vistas of Finding Nemo, and that's saying something.

Is Cars a disappointment? Only Pixar's enviable track record could make it seem so. Compared to even the better efforts of their competition (e.g., Over the Hedge, Robots), Cars is firing on all cylinders, and then some.

For what it's worth, no matter how consistently brilliant Pixar has been, I find that I never come to expect the next Pixar film to meet the same standard. Going into Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, I rather doubted each time that the film I was about to see would live up to their predecessors, and I was pleasantly dumbfounded each time to find my expectations exceeded. Cars doesn't exceed expectations, but it continues the winningest streak in Hollywood history with a film that any other creative team in Hollywood would kill to have be the weakest of their last five films.

P.S. Whatever you do, don't miss the end-credit outtakes, which include the funniest end-reel gag in Pixar history, as the cars go to a drive-in and watch excerpts from a number of films that seem awfully familiar.

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Cars (2006) | Decent Films - SDG Reviews

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Directed by Pixar honcho John Lasseter, who helmed Pixar's first three films (the brilliant Toy Story films and the lackluster A Bug's Life) but hasn't directed since, Cars ominously recalls some of the elements that made A Bug's Life the most pedestrian and uninspired project in Pixar's filmography.

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"The script, usually Pixar's secret weapon, is a surprisingly lame affair that substitutes endless automotive puns for real wit. The only bright spot in the tedium is Paul Newman, on magisterial form as a retired racer with a dark secret."

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It had to end sometime. After a run of standard-setting CGI movies, Pixar has finally delivered a dud. Cars is a marvel of technology, but underneath that shiny bonnet there is a serious shortage of horsepower. The story, borrowed wholesale from Doc Hollywood, sees an arrogant racing car, voiced by Owen Wilson, waylaid in a sleepy middle American town. There, he learns valuable lessons about (yawn) the importance of community and teamwork. It's Capra with hubcaps.

The world of Cars is a freakish place, inhabited solely by automobiles (even the insects are tiny trucks) and yet mysteriously devoid of pollution. The characters that make up Radiator Springs, the tiny town where Wilson's Lightning McQueen is stranded, are broadly recognisable types - a hippy camper van, a retired colonel represented by a Humvee, and so on.

However, where previous Pixar movies have made us care about toys, caterpillars and even fish, these automobiles prove impossible to love. Devoid of limbs, they are just faces on wheels, and thus rely heavily on the actors providing the voices. Wilson is OK, and Larry The Cable Guy (an American stand-up comic, apparently) does a sweet turn as a rusty-brained tow-truck, but Bonnie Hunt's love interest, a perky Porsche, leaves little impression. There's something icky about the romance anyway. How do they, you know, make little cars? If they were at it, surely we'd see the dents.

"A SURPRISINGLY LAME AFFAIR"

The script, usually Pixar's secret weapon, is a surprisingly lame affair that substitutes endless automotive puns for real wit. The only bright spot in the tedium is Paul Newman, on magisterial form as a retired racer with a dark secret.

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The big end's gone, guvnor. Cars is Pixar's shiniest, noisiest, and emptiest film yet.

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"The message in "Cars" is simplicity itself: Life was better in the old days, when it revolved around small towns where everybody knew each other, and around small highways like Route 66, where you made new friends, sometimes even between Flagstaff and Winona. This older America has long been much-beloved by Hollywood, and apparently it survives in Radiator Springs as sort of a time capsule."

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Chick Hicks (voice of Michael Keaton, from left), Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and The King (Richard Petty) come around the turn during the Piston Cup race in "Cars."

Cars (2006)

Rated G

117 minutes

Cast

Directed by

Written by

Based on the story by

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Cars movie review & film summary (2006) | Roger Ebert

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I wouldn't have thought that even in animation a 1951 Hudson Hornet could look simultaneously like itself and like Paul Newman, but you will witness that feat, and others, in "Cars." This is the new animated feature by John Lasseter ("Toy Story," "A Bug's Life"); it tells a bright and cheery story, and then has a little something profound lurking around the edges.

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"Alas, “too long” is the answer, and barring the boisterous antics of blue-collar comic Larry, there’s not much to make the time speed by. Granted, there are amusing sight gags involving the local bugs (in keeping with the automotive theme, Volkswagens with wings) and “tractor tipping,” but like Lightning himself, the action simply keeps running out of gas."

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With "Cars," Pixar's enviable streak of creative triumphs comes to a skidding stop. Despite representing another impressive technical achievement, it's the least visually interesting of the computer-animation boutique's movies, and - in an ironic twist for a story about auto racing - drifts slowly through its semi-arid midsection. Periodic bursts of cleverness brighten the festivities, but they're too few and far between, and the trademark humor that appeals to adults and kids often misfires. Pic should still possess plenty of G-rated horsepower commercially, but falls short of being the coming-out party Disney doubtless hoped for to showcase its Pixar acquisition.
John Lasseter, Pixar's leading creative force, is a self-proclaimed car enthusiast, and this marks his first directing effort since 1999's "Toy Story 2" - preceded by "A Bug's Life" and the original Buzz-Woody team-up. (Joe Ranft, his co-director, died last year after completing work on the film.)

Yet passion for the project notwithstanding, Lasseter discovers there are only so many car puns he and five other credited writers can exhaust. And while adults might chuckle over pop-culture references to, say, funny-car "Jay Limo," both they and many kids will grow antsy after an introductory racing sequence.

That race introduces Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), a brash racecar with a lone-wolf attitude. Lightning eschews hiring a crew chief, and his competition against the surly Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton) and veteran legend the King (racer Richard Petty) sets up a showdown in California a week hence. As a sign of his go-it-alone mentality, Lightning balks at trying to drum up enough friends to fill the 20 tickets allotted him.

Heading cross-country, Lightning inadvertently winds up marooned in the moribund Route 66 town of Radiator Springs, where his daredevil antics run afoul of the local judge, Doc Hudson (Paul Newman). As punishment, Lightning is forced to repave the town's decrepit road - a task he pursues with reluctance, given his goal of reaching California to win the Piston Cup.

Bypassed by Interstate 40, Radiator Springs features the usual assortment of colorful characters, in an all-car cast that includes an attractive Porsche, Sally (Bonnie Hunt); the slightly addled tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy); and a half-baked van that runs on "organic fuels," appropriately voiced by George Carlin. The question is how long it will take for Lightning to revive the town, while simultaneously learning the meaning of friendship.

Alas, "too long" is the answer, and barring the boisterous antics of blue-collar comic Larry, there's not much to make the time speed by. Granted, there are amusing sight gags involving the local bugs (in keeping with the automotive theme, Volkswagens with wings) and "tractor tipping," but like Lightning himself, the action simply keeps running out of gas.

Even Randy Newman's score isn't particularly distinguished, or too frequently gets drowned out by the sound of roaring tires. Nor will the racing sequences galvanize those who aren't NASCAR fans, despite an astounding display of computer-generated wizardry and detail - from the car-filled stadiums down to the little grooves on the track.

Still, nothing here approaches the undersea wonder of "Finding Nemo," the childlike inspiration behind "Monsters Inc." or the excitement and sly wit of "The Incredibles" - a high standard, admittedly, but the expectation bar against which all Pixar ventures inevitably will be judged.

Where "Cars" works best, frankly, might be in oiling the synergistic wheels of the Disney-Pixar marriage - offering the enticing prospect of theme park tie-ins, battery-powered toys and other assorted merchandising.

Ultimately, however, those benefits are only maximized if the movie delivers, and while the inventive closing-credit animation should send patrons out smiling, that breezy detour arrives at the end of a dusty, near-two-hour ride.

Pixar's run of hits has been nothing short of amazing, rivaling Disney's early animated classics. Yet after assembling its version of the magnificent six, the company has settled for at best a so-so seventh.

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With "Cars," Pixar's enviable streak of creative triumphs comes to a skidding stop. Despite another impressive technical achievement, it's the least visually interesting of the computer-animation boutique's movies, and drifts slowly through its semi-arid midsection. Pic should still possess plenty of G-rated horsepower commercially.

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'"Cars" finds a pleasant and often sparkling groove. Each car looks unique (though all have eyes on their windshield rather than the expected headlights), with precise character details: Doc's silver grille looks like a dapper mustache; Mater, when he sleeps, drools oil. All the colors look slightly faded in the Southwestern sun, and some of the scenes (such as a gorgeous drive through a tree-lined canyon) have the idyllic beauty of a vacation postcard."

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Hot wheels Pixar fuels its delightful "Cars" with lots of personality

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A tangle of race cars swirls around a vast track, moving so fast they're just a flash of color and dust. We watch the race, and then we're shown the stands - they, too, are full of cars, thousands of them, each a dot of quivering color like an enormous rack of M&Ms. This is the world of "Cars," the newest feature from Pixar Animation Studios, and it's a delight.

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Even without any humans at all present the film "Cars", it is still so fun to watch. It feels as if you are there seeing them race yourself. With the fun color pallets and the variety of personalities each character has. Even each different story of every car absolutely makes the viewer fill with excitement.

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1) At first Lightning only thinks about himself and how badly he needs to win, but after staying in Radiator Springs he shows that winning isn't always that important by helping King cross the finish line even if it meant he wouldn't come first

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2) When Lightning arrives at Radiator Springs everyone is so excited to meet him but he doesn't feel that way at first, later on he warms up to them and realizes how nice it is having friends and small community around you is

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3) Radiator Springs even though small and left behind it still has this natural beauty to it that is also portrayed through the cars, like how Mater even though all rusty and a tad bit slow he finds a way to make connections with everyone he meets

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4) Radiator Springs has a vast sky with a gran canyon type or terrains with high mountains, showing how beautiful a small town can be

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Peter Bradshaw The Guardian’s film critic calls the film dull with no good gags or songs saying that “ Naturally the animation is top-of-the-range, but an awful lot of mega-bytes and laptop hours have been lavished on the frankly uninteresting spectacle of those zillions of almost identical little car spectators in the stadium, their flashbulbs twinkling. ”

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Cars is an incredible animation even if it it isn’t necessarily the funniest it is nostalgic and has such key points to tell about friendships, honor, respect, and being humble. The film beautifully tells all of this in such a beautiful way only using automobiles and yet it is still intriguing as you can tell how each of them are different from their personalities, their life story, and even the type of car it is.

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"The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning. And boy, can these guys do a sky: If you've got a sentimental weakness for the hues that play across the cloud tufts as the big orb sinks behind the mountains, this is the movie for you."