Less than Excellent

Cars (John Lasseter, 2006)

The latest Pixar film, Cars, is an enjoyable animated film that should leave audiences pretty happy. I want to say this up front, because this is going to sound like a negative review. For while Cars is a good film, it is also the first Pixar film that falls short of excellence. It is therefore much more interesting to talk about what doesn’t work in Cars: by now, we all know what’s good about Pixar’s films, but this is our first look at a less-than-excellent one.

The film tells of Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a cocky young racecar who becomes lost while crossing the United States on his way to his next big race. A series of misadventures leave him trapped in the small town of Radiator Springs, a formerly bustling town that has gone into economic decline after being bypassed by the interstate highway. The slick, big city resident is initially appalled, but eventually learns some salutary lessons from the folksy locals.

The world of Cars is subtly different in conception from previous Pixar films. Where in the earlier films the anthropomorphised animals and toys existed out of our sight, but in what was recognisably our own world, in Cars humans are dispensed with and vehicles take our place. It’s a limiting concept, because the filmmakers have to be very careful to constrain the scope of what we see to avoid the strangeness of its world becoming too obvious. None of the characters can pick anything up, for example, or sit around a table, or go to bed, or hug, or go through a normal sized doorway. Action is generally played out on or around the roads, on raceways, or in a very limited stock of buildings that are designed essentially as large garages. We can never truly explore the world of Cars because if we did, it would all stop making sense. There are buildings on the main street, for example, with conventional verandahs and stairs at the front. Who uses them? This might seem like an odd point to make, but it matters because it is subtly distancing: Cars never seems to take place in as fully realised a fantasy world as previous Pixar films.

Children aren’t likely to pick on a point like this, of course, and the film feels much more purely a kids’ movie than its predecessors. Which is fine, in theory, but it’s a backward step for Pixar to be moving away from its triumphantly all-age entertainments towards purely juvenile entertainment. Indeed, after the leap forward of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, there is much about Cars that feels like a retreat. The very idea of basing the film entirely on cars reeks of the early years of computer features, where the concept had to be built around the kind of characters that computers could render effectively: toys, insects, monsters, and so on. The Incredibles was a milestone in its use of appealing, cartoony humans in computer animation, and the short that precedes Cars, One Man Band, builds on that work. The casting of an entire film with metal vehicles, then, seems to miss some of the opportunities that have opened up since Lasseter last directed a CG feature (1999’s Toy Story 2).

The problem with having a cast full of cars is that the animation is hamstrung: without arms or legs, the cars are roughly anatomically equivalent to humans lying on their stomach with arms and legs bound. That severely limits what the animators can do to express emotion, other than standard facial animation. The Pixar crew try admirably, using every trick in the book to add life to the animation: distorting the shapes of the cars; having them weave around on the road in expressive ways; and adorning them with props (including one really odd scene where a car wears a giant set of headphones). Unfortunately, it only gets them so far. The film looks beautiful – the digital backgrounds and landscapes are really breathtaking – but the central characters are never as appealing as their Pixar predecessors.

This is particularly problematic because of the kind of story Cars trys to tell. The central section of the film slows down the pace as McQueen learns some lessons in life, love, and small-town values. It’s a tried and true Hollywood formula, but tricky to pull off in animation, because such stories rely so heavily on character interplay to provide their interest. Without genuine human interaction, and with animated characters that are even more limited than most, it is very hard for Lasseter and his colleagues to keep this kind of story going. The film therefore loses momentum badly in its middle section, as we wait for McQueen to learn the lessons that the audience has figured out for him in the film’s opening five minutes. And while the formulaic story structure can be excused as “classical,” there’s unfortunately less excuse for the characters, who are generally one note personalities derived from their makes of cars. The Kombi van is a hippy, the jeep is militaristic, and the Fiat is, well, Italian.

Because the characters don’t gel as successfully as the earlier Pixar features, it’s harder to become emotionally involved in the film, which makes the appeal to sentiment more off-putting. Just as Toy Story 2 featured a flashback set to a Randy Newman ballad to illuminate its key theme, so too does Cars. Yet here, the sequence is almost embarassing: the music swells, the images go hazy and nostalgic, and we get a ballad about… a highway bypass. Apart from anything else, the thematic logic is all wrong here. Yes, bypasses devastate small communities, but if you were going to do a film about the decline of small American towns, why would you do it with a cast entirely of cars? Given what havoc the predominance of automobiles has wrought on both urban and rural environments, the use of an all-car cast leaves the film with a nonsensical semantic muddle. Lasseter is left trying to fashion images of the town’s heyday that look bustling but which aren’t too obviously choked with traffic.

Perhaps things like this don’t matter. If the jokes are funny and the action exciting – and for the record, the jokes are funny and the action is exciting – who cares if the film’s pro-car iconography is at odds with its message? Well, I’d argue details like this do matter, because they are the difference between the solidly constructed screenplays that have been Pixar’s hallmark, and the more slipshod work of their imitators. In the earlier films, plot and theme were seamlessly matched. In the Toy Story films the idea of a toy needing to be played with comments on our need for acceptance and companionship. A Bug’s Life used hive insects to comment on community solidarity. In Finding Nemo, the image of the sea dropping off at the edge of the reef was a perfect literalisation of the limits of the comfort zone in which Nemo had been constrained by his overprotective father…. and so on. When the fit between a film’s story and its moral isn’t so organic and well thought out, you go from having a film with heart to a film that uncomfortably peddles a self-conscious “message” to its audience.

And yet, despite all these things, Cars is still worth seeing. Lasseter and his colleagues are the best in the business, and they still somehow pull Cars together despite all its flaws. They know how to make a gag read, how to make characters likeable (despite, in this case, their thin personalities), how to build an exciting climax, and how to make a film look visually beautiful. Despite all the things in Cars that are ill-judged, Lasseter is a skilfull enough driver to get it where it needs to go. Cars won’t give you a bad time, and it isn’t a bad film: but when it’s over you will have a much better idea of what a mediocre Pixar movie would look like.