Cars | Little White Lies

Cars

28 Jul 2006 / Released: 28 Jul 2006

Words by Matt Bochenski

Directed by Joe Ranft, and John Lasseter

Starring Bonnie Hunt, Owen Wilson, and Paul Newman

Red car with headlights and racing decals on a racing track with crowd in the background.
Red car with headlights and racing decals on a racing track with crowd in the background.
3

Anticipation.

It’s Pixar but advance word hasn’t been great.

2

Enjoyment.

Amusing and visually stunning but crass and predictable. It’s a failure.

2

In Retrospect.

It’s dubious stereotyping will stick with you like the smell of petrol making your nose itch.

John Las­seter has described the film as a present to the world’. You might want to keep the receipt.

Choirs of angels take to the skies; the hal­lowed vaults of Pixar have been thrown open and the world weeps in awe. That’s how it feels as the Emeryville giants lead their lat­est offer­ing out of the garage. Its pre­de­ces­sors – Toy Sto­ry, Mon­sters, Inc, Find­ing Nemo and The Incred­i­bles – are a flaw­less canon of mod­ern clas­sics. But they cast a giant shad­ow from which Cars nev­er tru­ly emerges.

The con­ceit must have seemed so bril­liant­ly sim­ple. Imag­ine a world pop­u­lat­ed entire­ly by cars – they own hotels, run garages, read the news. And they race. It’s the cli­max of the Pis­ton Cup and Light­ning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wil­son), a hot­shot young rook­ie, is in the run­ning for the cham­pi­onship. There’s one more race to go before his dreams of girls, glo­ry and pri­mo-gaso­line are realised, but on the way to the track he’s marooned in the Hicksville town of Radi­a­tor Springs, slap bang in the des­o­late dust bowl of Route 66.

What fol­lows is, well, not real­ly all that sur­pris­ing – an array of odd­ball towns­folk teach our young hero impor­tant life lessons and yad­da, yad­da, yad­da, he ends up a wis­er, bet­ter per­son. But you’ll for­give Cars its moments of pre­dictabil­i­ty because it’s such a sump­tu­ous spec­ta­cle. From the sub­tly shift­ing sun­light danc­ing across paint­work, to the eye-pop­ping vir­tu­al cam­er­a­work at the race­tracks, Pixar have tak­en the bar and sim­ply tossed it away. Game over.

What’s less easy to digest is the jar­ring parochial­ism on which the enter­prise is built. The sad grandeur of Radi­a­tor Springs stands for a whole gen­er­a­tion of high­way towns that were lost when the inter­states cut off the life-blood of traf­fic pass­ing through America’s inte­ri­or. But as with NASCAR and its Red State fan­base, this is a pecu­liar­ly Amer­i­can milieu root­ed in nos­tal­gia and con­tempt for progress. It doesn’t trav­el well. It’s hard to care about these cars or their regres­sive­ly dull sport in which they cir­cle a track for 300 laps in the same direction.

That’s the thing: they’re just cars. Find­ing Nemo wasn’t a film about’ fish any­more than The Incred­i­bles was a film about’ super­heroes – they went much fur­ther and touched on issues much deep­er than a sim­ple sto­ry­board con­cept would have sug­gest­ed. But here, the cars are very much the stars, lov­ing­ly ren­dered and beau­ti­ful designed, but too mechan­i­cal to pos­sess a real heart.

On top of that, the con­cept is flawed. The idea that cer­tain types of cars ful­fil cer­tain types of roles is eth­i­cal­ly dubi­ous and moral­ly objec­tion­able. It leads to lazy racial stereo­typ­ing (a Fer­rari-mad Ital­ian Fiat? Real­ly, Pixar?) and worse. Wit­ness Sal­ly, a Porsche and LA lawyer liv­ing the high life. Pre­sum­ably she didn’t choose to become a Porsche after high-school – she was born that way and was thus des­tined to live a life of priv­i­lege; as opposed to Mack, Lightning’s 18-tonne truck born into back-break­ing servi­tude. Pre­sum­ably the Civ­il Rights Move­ment got stuck in traffic.

Despite the humour, the atten­tion to detail and an arse­nal of in-jokes, these blun­ders stand out because slow­ly but sure­ly they break the spell of Pixar’s mag­ic. Cars just doesn’t work. It’s a great idea, but it hasn’t been realised onscreen.

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