Review: Cars

I have to admit, I really was not looking forward to watching Cars. Pixar's last movie, The Incredibles, was a pretty big disappointment to me. I know that I go against the grain with that particular thinking, since everyone else I know not only liked The Incredibles, but thought it was the best Pixar movie to date. Furthermore, the problem with Cars was that I really have no affection for cars, per se. Cute furry monsters? Sure. Cute aquatic animals? Of course. But cars? To me, a car can look good and stylish, but at the end of the day it's just a tool to get me from point A to point B. Sure, it might look nice and I can appreciate how one car can be much better than another one, but I can't say that I "love" one car any more than some other car. I simply have no great affection for cars in and of themselves.

The first few minutes of Cars did not do much to change my mind. As the simple plot elements were laid out and the characters set up, it all seemed to be standard children's story stuff. Here you have the young, brash rookie who is selfish and thinks only about fame and fortune and winning. No doubt by the end of the movie he will learn the importance of friends and that winning isn't everything. Ho-hum.

But the best movies are great because at their heart they are about "something". Let's take Singing in the Rain for example. Sure, it's thoroughly enjoyable for its great dance sequences and memorable songs, as well as the snappy dialogue. But the thing that ties the whole movie together and gives it a soul is the core story about the decline of the silent film and how that affected the actors of that era. Everything is framed around that, and gives it meaning and life. It turns the movie from a simple pleasurable distraction into a touching and meaningful story.

The same thing happens slowly with Cars. While the story is ostensibly about the main character learning to embrace others and care about more than just winning, really the story is about the experience of driving and how it affects others. Just like Singing in the Rain was about the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, and how that affected the people who were left behind, Cars is about the decline of driving for the sake of driving, how society has changed to focus just on expediency, and in the process left behind an entire way of life. The town of Radiator Springs and its inhabitants represent not just things that have been left behind due to the construction of a highway, but an entire culture that has been left behind. The quaint little town servicing travelers has disappeared from relevance as people travel faster and faster down the highway. And in that way, the town also represents a central theme of American cinema: the continued erosion of man's ability to enjoy life as he ironically tries to find more time to do more with his life. The highway enables people to get where they want to go just a little bit faster, at the cost of being able to enjoy the journey there. Cars elevates itself from the mundane because of its exploration of this cost.

Doing so required Cars to emotionally connect the audience with the characters who live in the town, and this, like they have so done so expertly with their past films, they did with aplomb. All the individual characters have wonderfully shaped personalities, and their affinity both for each other and for the town they live in is well conveyed. This makes their plight all the more poignant. As usual, Pixar does a fantastic job describing these characters and then slowly showing their predicament and tying everything into a nice coherent story. All the piece fit wonderfully together.

On a technical note, there was something truly remarkable about the film as well. I watched it projected digitally with a DLP 2K projector, and for about the middle third of the movie, the part that takes place mostly in Radiator Springs, the computer animation was so good that I thought I was watching miniature cars being manipulated on a miniature set. Now, this might not sound like much of an achievement. After all, I'm sure the people at Pixar would much rather have me believe that the cars and sets are REAL, not miniatures. But realize that miniatures ARE real! You can hold a miniature, touch it with your fingers, pick it up and move it around. For me to imagine that the images on the screen were actually real things and not just fabricated computer pixels is an achievement in and of itself, at least in my eyes. I had never before imagined that what I was watching on the screen was real in any other Pixar movie. I never thought there were real fish, miniature or otherwise, in Finding Nemo. I never thought that the sets in Monsters, Inc were real. This was my main problem with The Incredibles, the animation simply could not make me believe that any of those characters were real, but the movie tried to treat them a little bit too much as if they were real. But in Cars, the lighting effects, the textures, the details, everything was so perfect for that middle third of the movie that I actually believed that those buildings in that little town existed, that the trees were dug into dirt and the little cars were lying on the side of the road. Yes, only as miniatures built to scale and filmed using macro lenses, but nonetheless REAL miniatures. That blew me away.

So overall, while I went into Cars not expecting to like it very much, ultimately it both touched my heart with its depictions of the little town's inhabitants and their plight, and it wow'ed me with its technical achievements.

I'd give it an 8 out of 10.