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Review by Vives Anunciacion

Cars
Directed by John Lasseter
Written by Dan Fogelman, Robert L. Baird
Featuring the voices of Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt
GP / 116 minutes
Walt Disney/ Pixar Animations

Who knows how far a car can get
Before you think about slowin' on down
- Aretha Franklin, Freeway of
Love

America’s love affair with the automobile turns hilarious with Cars, the latest model to emerge from the Disney-Pixar factory of adorable animation. Get your motor runnin’ for a fun journey with Cars.

The Disney and Pixar tandem so far has produced the best collection of studio animations (outside Japan) since Toy Story in 1995. Cars is a worthy addition to this collection, but it’s definitely not Pixar’s best since the studio raised the animation bar too high with the amazing The Incredibles in 2004.

Cars begins in the middle of the Piston Cup race where rookie Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is preparing to take the championship from his idol, Strip “the King” Weathers (voiced by NASCAR Nextel Cup champ Richard Petty), who retires at the end of the season. Forever at the heels (bumper?) of the King is Chick Hicks (former Batman Michael Keaton), who will do anything in his means to be the champ.

Despite Lightning’s positive appeal, he is too self-centered to care for other things except win the trophy. His vanity quite literally causes his tires to burst, forcing a surprising three-way tie between The King, Hicks and McQueen. On the way to the championship race in California, Lightning gets sidetracked into the dusty old town of Radiator Springs, which sits along historic Route 66 (kinda like our National Hi-way, but longer). Once there, the story screeches down to cruising speed.

At Radiator Springs, Lightning meets a fleet of old-school cars – the town simpleton Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy), sexy Sally (Bonnie Hunt) the Porsche lawyer, and the serious vintage Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), who seems to hide a secret past. Lightning’s accident forces him to stay in Radiator Springs until he fixes everything he damaged along the way. It is this extended stay in Radiator Springs that teaches Lightning how to take things on a stride and discover that life is more than just reaching the finish line.

There’s no doubt that Pixar’s animation and storytelling techniques are still miles away from competition. Compared to other Pixar animations featuring toys and cuddly animals, it is quite a challenge to make metallic cars as adorable as the fish in Finding Nemo. Cars looks very impressive.

But storywise, there’s an obvious similarity with the 1991 comedy Doc Hollywood starring Michael J. Fox, wherein a city doctor gets stranded in a backward town while serving community sentence. Youngsters won’t find anything wrong with this similarity, but those familiar with Doc Hollywood may be scratching their heads as to how Pixar failed to come up with something more substantially original. Funny lines do not make a movie memorable, most of the time characters do. Cars’ humanized cars are a little bland, no amount of shiny paint can make Lightning as cuddly as a bear.

Cars wants its audience to remember the glory days of the Highway, when people moved around to see places and meet people, instead of hurrying along the expressway in the pursuit of the metaphorical deadline. Maybe the animation Cars is trying to boost the stagnant US auto industry, which is why there are barey sny Japanese cars in the roster.

Filipinos can’t obsess with automobiles the same way Americans have since the T-Model Ford put them on wheels in1908 – not with weekly gas price increases and snarled EDSA traffic. But these Cars are an exception.