Cars

Next up in “Disney’s Pixar Month” is the 2006 film, “Cars,” a nice movie that doesn’t deserve any of the hate that it is given.

Roger Ebert started his review out by saying, “I wouldn't have thought that even in animation a 1951 Hudson Hornet could look simultaneously like itself and like Paul Newman, but you will witness that feat, and others, in "Cars."” This Pixar animated film by John Lasseter tells a nice and happy story, but also includes a little something deep just around the corner. With this film, it’s a sense of loss.

What’s the loss, you ask? Our protagonist, a racing car named Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), is in a three-way tie in a race with Strip "The King" Weathers (Richard Petty) and Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton), and when he’s going to the tie-breaking race, he gets lost and ends up in the forgotten town of Radiator Springs, in Carburetor County. Roger Ebert noted, “This was a happenin' town, back when Route 66 was the way to get from Chicago to L.A., passing through Flagstaff, Arizona, and don't forget Winona. But now the interstates and time itself have passed it by, and the town slumbers on, a memory of an earlier America.”

Lightning’s dream is to win the Piston Cup, the highest trophy of American racing. He’s on his way to the race when he gets lost, and things get worse when he gets impounded. Once he’s out, he meets the folks of Radiator Springs, who the leader is Doc Hudson, voiced by the late Paul Newman, who might be old but has more knowledge about Hudsons than Lightning: Ebert noted, “Because of their "step-down design," they had a lower center of gravity than the Big 3 models of its time and won stock car races by making tighter turns.”

Other citizens include Mater (rhymes with tow-mater) the Tow Truck (comedian Larry the Cable Guy), Sally the Porsche (Bonnie Hunt), Fillmore the hippie VW bug (the late George Carlin), Sarge the veteran Jeep (Paul Dooley), Ramone (Cheech Marin), Flo (Jenifer Lewis), Luigi (Tony Shalhoub), Guido (Guido Quaroni), Lizzie (Katherine Helmond), and Red (the late Joe Ranft). Ebert mentioned, “Tractors serve as the cows of Radiator Springs, and even chew their cud, although what that cud consists of I'm not sure. Fan belts, maybe.”

The message in “Cars” is simply easiness: This is what Ebert said, “Life was better in the old days, when it revolved around small towns where everybody knew each other, and around small highways like Route 66, where you made new friends, sometimes even between Flagstaff and Winona.” The old America has always been loved by Hollywood, and it looks like it survives in Radiator Springs as a kind of nostalgia.

We find out that Doc Hudson was a famous race car in his youth. Ebert went on to say, “That leads up to a race in which the vet and the kid face off, although how that race ends I would not dream of revealing. What I will reveal, with regret, is that the movie lacks a single Studebaker. The 1950s Studebakers are much beloved by all period movies, because they so clearly signal their period, from the classic Raymond Loewy-designed models to the Golden Hawk, which left Corvettes and T-Birds eating its dust. Maybe there's no Hawk in Radiator Springs because then Doc Hudson would lose his bragging rights.”

This movie is amazing to look at and a whole lot of fun, but it doesn’t have that extra ingredient the other Pixar films had. It could possibly be that there’s not so much going on here, and not a child character we can relate to. Ebert ended his review by saying, “I wonder if the movie's primary audience, which skews young, will much care about the 1950s and its cars. Maybe they will. Of all decades, the 1950s seems to have the most staying power; like Archie and Jughead, the decade stays forever young, perhaps because that's when modern teenagers were invented.”

Like I have stated, this movie doesn’t deserve all the hate people give it. I personally think this was an enjoyable movie and one of the best Pixar ever came out with. Don’t listen to people like Doug Walker, who hate this movie. I know that there could have been something better, but for a Pixar movie geared towards kids, this movie did a great job. See it for yourself and I promise you’ll love it.

Stay tuned tomorrow when we look at an actually cute movie the company came out with in “Disney’s Pixar Month.”