From the archive: "Cars"

It's a sign of just how spoilt we've been by digital animation - especially this summer, where computer software packages have clearly plummeted in price and we've consequently been swamped by such titles as Over the Hedge, The Ant Bully and Monster House - that the reviews for Pixar's latest, Cars, have mostly been muted. To summarise these early reports, Cars is no Toy Story, nor The Incredibles. It's all right, but that's all it is. Narratively, this is the tale of Lightning McQueen, a cocky young racecar (voiced by Owen Wilson) who, on his way to a big meet in California, crashes in the small town of Radiator Springs. According to the locals - a gap-toothed towtruck (Larry the Cable Guy), a flirty coupé (Bonnie Hunt) and garage elder Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) - Radiator Springs is the model of a small American backwater, unfortunately bypassed by the local interstate. For Lightning McQueen, it's nothing short of "hillbilly hell". He'll come round.

Someone among the sixteen-strong writing team must have an unusual fondness for the old Michael J. Fox vehicle Doc Hollywood, which again insisted its protagonist stay in town as part of a civic works program: where Fox's arrogant doctor had to repair the damage he did to a fence, McQueen has to oversee the relaying of an entire thoroughfare. Yet even if you haven't seen Doc Hollywood - and there's no pressing reason for you to have done so - then the narrative trajectory of Cars may strike you as familiar, for all filmmakers, exposed to enough success, will eventually come to take success (or fame) as their subject. Consider it writing what you know.

The opening sequence, for example, could only have been produced by a studio in their pomp: all light, noise and speed, crowds of (admittedly digitised) extras, and an anonymously triumphant MOR song on the soundtrack. Lightning McQueen is clearly suffering from that most modern of diseases, celebrity, for which the only cure can be a move back to the sticks and a lesson in community and teamwork. You want proof of this? Consider the heavy migration out of Los Angeles by all those renouncing hot chicks and glitter in favour of taking up residence in small towns like Radiator Springs. (No, I didn't think so, either.) Even a studio as likable as Pixar has no luck with this, the least convincing of all Hollywood redemption plots.

Cars also suffers from bad timing: not only by emerging in a summer full of pixels, but a summer where awareness of global warming has made the internal combustion engine public enemy number one, and at a moment where Formula One racing has become little more than a way for vapid playboys to support a bling lifestyle. (Actually, Cars is very much a film for the NASCAR crowd - the legendary Mario Andretti has a cameo as himself as a car, if you see what I mean - which may further limit its appeal to non-American audiences.) If you'll excuse the pun, this is a work driven by nostalgia for the golden age of driving; The Obligatory Randy Newman Song goes something like "Long ago/Not-so-long ago/The world was different/Oh yes, it was". The retro feel runs counter to Pixar's previous philosophy: films like the Toy Stories and Finding Nemo were surely all about embracing change and growth, however painful it may be.

If Cars lacks the magic of its studio's greatest achievements, it nonetheless offers a measure of compensation. The palette of 50s pinks and peppermints is visually appealing. And the design work, which strives to find automotive equivalents for everything, from the tyre tracks that take the place of airplane vapour trails to the "Braking News" updates rolling across the bottom of TV screens, is beautifully detailed. (One niggle is that Cars continues the trend of having supporting parts in CG animations dubbed by minor indigenous celebrities. Following Kate Thornton in Shrek 2 and Fiona GMTV in Shark Tale, Cars gives us the thespian debut of Jeremy Clarkson as Lightning McQueen's agent. As the role was voiced by the great Jeremy Piven in the original U.S. dub, it's a double sacrilege - for all the comic timing Clarkson displays, Disney could have got Jeremy Spake from Airport to dub it.) I wasn't as sold on A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. as some of my colleagues - in fact, I'd probably take Antz and Monster House over them - so Cars didn't appear quite as big a disappointment or betrayal of the Pixar ethos to me as it apparently did to some. It's the first Pixar film to be merely average, and that's okay; it's all right, and that's all right, too.

(August 2006)