I should have known as we walked into the the­ater to see Cars and my son started scream­ing, “No! No! No!” that I should have heeded his warn­ing. True, he wasn’t scream­ing at Cars, but at a pre­view for some film called Ant Bully, but still, dense dad that I am, I should have lis­tened to him. He’s young with those hip new ideas about things, you know.

You know his opin­ion of Cars, now here’s mine.

Light­ning McQueen is a liv­ing, breath­ing car that lives in a strange alter­nate uni­verse where cars, not peo­ple, are the dom­i­nant life form on the planet. They do every­thing that humans do, except that they’re cars. If I were an ama­teur film critic in this par­al­lel uni­verse he lives in I’d prob­a­bly say “Cars is 16 cylin­ders of fun!”, or “Race on down to it!” or some­thing lame like that, since I would also be a car who loves other cars and other car-related things.

But I’m human and not a car and don’t love all car related things. Most of all, I didn’t love Cars.

Star­ring:
Owen Wil­son, Paul New­man, Michael Keaton, Bon­nie Hunt, Richard Petty, Cheech Marin
Directed By:
John Las­seter & Joe Ranft
Release Date:
June 9, 2006
MPAA Rat­ing:
G
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Buena Vista Pic­tures Dis­tri­b­u­tion
2 Stars

It’s not that I don’t love Pixar films. I usu­ally freak­ing LOVE Pixar films. God bless Pixar, for they are the only rea­son that Dis­ney makes money any­more, and hon­estly, shouldn’t Pixar be mak­ing ALL Dis­ney films at this point? A Pixar film is a hall­mark of cin­e­matic qual­ity; when you see that lit­tle bounc­ing lamp come out at the begin­ning of their films, you know you’re in for a great time and you’re also going to be amazed in some way. Not only are you going to get great look­ing ani­ma­tion, but a sto­ry­line that is engag­ing and funny too.

I love Toy Story, both 1 and 2, and The Incred­i­bles is one of the great films of the past 10 years. My son loves Find­ing Nemo and every time he sees a clown­fish it’s named “Nemo”, never “Fred” or “Biff”, just “Nemo”. I have less admi­ra­tion for Mon­sters, Inc. and A Bug’s Life, mainly because I didn’t find them as inter­est­ing in the plot depart­ment, but they still looked great. If you watch the “mak­ing of” bits on each DVD for these films you can see the evo­lu­tion of the Pixar ani­ma­tion process and they grow expo­nen­tion­ally with each new release.

Cars looks phe­nom­e­nal. You’d think the open­ing bit, where Light­ning is intro­duced, was the cam­era pan­ning over a real car it looks so good. Pixar cares about how their films look, and the detail is great, but before where the plot­lines were semi-complex, Cars could have been writ­ten by me in 2nd grade. Come on man, who couldn’t have come up with this?

An arro­gant race car gets lost on his way to a race. While try­ing to find his way back to where he got lost in the first place, he comes upon a sleepy out-of-the-way town where time prac­ti­cally stands still. In the process of try­ing to leave the small town, he will come to under­stand that being arro­gant isn’t every­thing it’s cracked up to be and he will make new life­long friends where before he had none. He will also over­come adver­sity in the final “bat­tle” and be suc­cess­ful with­out over­do­ing it the way he did before.

Take out the phrase “race car” from the first sen­tence of the para­graph and you’ve got a generic movie of the week or even some of your friends’ lives. It’s not a very com­plex story, but it also isn’t a very inter­est­ing story. What the Pixar peo­ple try to do with this weak story is make up for it with eye candy, but it’s not enough. The plot just doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain.