Cars

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) leads the Piston Cup in Pixar's new animated film Cars. As per all of their efforts, the hero must learn his lesson before being allowed to continue onwards and upwards, and in this film that takes place in Radiator Springs, a backwater on Route 66. It is with the other cars in the town he will learn the value of friendship and family and all those other Pixar values. Thank you Papa Lasseter.

CHRIS: It was again with a little trepidation that I went into Cars, from supreme animation house Pixar, and again directed by John Lasseter, who made the original Toy Story films. Much more obviously than say The Incredibles, this film is marketed and pitched squarely at a younger audience: the whole talking car thing does seem a bit 10-year-old boy. But it is of course pulled off with their usual flair and eye for detail, and a voice cast including one or two of the famous (Owen Wilson and Paul Newman) and many others not quite so well known. My first thought on seeing the film is that it actually worked quite well, as it avoided some of the pitfalls of say Shark Tale in which the animated characters have imported characteristics from their voice actors - though the pearl blue eyes of Doc Hudson are a dead giveway for Newman. Everything is animated spectacularly well, and there is some landscape recreation that is very pleasing to the eye; all of which we have come to expect from Pixar. So what is there not to like? I suppose it's that extra level that's missing from Cars: the ability to be appreciated by young and old isn't there I think; and as well there isn't much flair to the storytelling at all, limited as it is by its form.

The Incredibles has been the best animated film for many years in my opinon, and one of the great things about that film was that it (very consciously) catered for all of the people that would make up the audience for the movie. The first problem is that it deals with talking cars: the whole Thomas the Tank Engine angle just undercuts the story, and it's not as if it's just the cars talking: the concept of the film is that the world is populated entirely by cars. So we have lady-like Porsches, a Hummer which is clearly supposed to be Arnie, and even some little sports groupie hatchbacks. I can see what the filmmakers are getting at here, but I can't really accept it, especially when the cars go 'home' and into their 'rooms', I mean these things don't have arms! And Lightning McQueen doesn't even have headlights! I know that once again I haven't really taken the film on its own terms, but still it doesn't even go very far with the concept: the film could've been told with people and I would have got exactly the same things out of it. There are some neat gags, like going 'tractor tipping' but beyond that I think the director may have fallen so in love with animating the cars that he forgot to back it up properly. And so the message comes across in a very sugar coated sort of way, and it bashes you over the head to such a degree it borders on the insulting for anyone over about ten.

But despite all that, it's hard to dislike Cars. I think Owen Wilson is an excellent choice to voice the main character, and all of the others do a creditable job as well, especially the parodies. It's just too bland to stand out from the crowd I think, and it's definitely inferior to Pixar's previous efforts, despite the extraordinary quality of the animation - that's really going to be the form to watch in the next few years I think, especially with innovations like Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, which will arrive in Australia later this year. If this film was live action, I think it would fall flat, and that's the greatest test of the form. This simply wasn't true of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and especially The Incredibles, and while Cars is diverting enough, and has its fair share of good moments, it really is nothing special.

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