movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/movies/09cars.html
Click Here MOVIE REVIEW MORE ON 'Cars' 'Cars' Is a Drive Down a Lonely Highway Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures Lighting McQueen leads the King at a motor speedway in "Cars."
"Toy Story 2" tools along at an easy clip, rather like a Volvo station wagon en route to another family vacation. At no point does it spin out of control, much less venture off-road. Instead, the film just putt, putt, putts along, a shining model of technological progress and consumer safety. But, as Ed (Big Daddy) Roth might say, chrome don't get you home and neither does 3D animation.
More Photos >> Mr Roth was the creator of a delightfully unappetizing cartoon rodent called Rat Fink, a kind of anti-Mickey Mouse mascot for the hot-rod set. Given Pixar's carefully cultivated and, for the most part, justified reputation as a modestly maverick outfit, it would be nice to think that a decal of Rat Fink adorns the computers of at least a couple of the film's many, many animators.
The film opens at an enormous speedway, where some dozen candy-colored race cars, including Lightning McQueen, are whooshing around a track as thousands upon thousands of similarly polychromic jalopies cheer, wave flags and do the wave. Welcome to Weirdsville, Cartoonland, where automobiles race and rule in a world that, save for a thicket of tall pines and an occasional scrubby bush, is freakishly absent any organic matter. Here, even the bugs singeing their wings on the porch light look like itty-bitty Volkswagen beetles. That sounds like a slap and a tickle, and for a while it's both.
Paul Newman), who gives the story its requisite geezer wisdom. After taking a wrong turn on his way to a race, McQueen lands in Radiator Springs, a town that time and the freeway forgot.
This ethnic and cultural profiling is pretty much par for the animated film course, hence Jenifer Lewis, as a two-tone 1950's ride with big fins called Flo, provides the only identifiable "black" voice.
Tony Shalhoub), a banana-yellow Italian-accented Fiat that runs the local tire store; Sarge (Paul Dooley), a World War II jeep as memorable and colorful as dung;
George Carlin), a VW bus who extols the virtues of organic fuel, mutters about conspiracies and raises the Stars and Stripes to the guitar squeals of Jimi Hendrix. An animated fable about happy cars might have made sense before gas hit three bucks a gallon, but even an earlier sticker date couldn't shake the story's underlying creepiness, which comes down to the fact that there's nothing alive here: nada, zip.
"The Terminator," which hinges on the violent war of the machine world on its human masters. To watch McQueen and the other cars motor along the film's highways and byways without running into or over a single creature is to realize that, in his cheerful way, Mr Lasseter has done Mr Cameron one better: instead of blowing the living world into smithereens, these machines have just gassed it with carbon monoxide.
As if realizing that they can't (yet) compete with nature, Pixar filmmakers tend to avoid the human form or create caricatures that, by virtue of their very exaggeration (think of the middle-age spread bedeviling Mr Incredible's wife), are wonderfully lifelike. With his machine world, however, Mr Lasseter appears to have tried to do an end run around the vexing problem of the human body with cars that might as well have come out of a Chevron advertisement. Even stranger, the film turns Detroit's paving over of America into an occasion for some nostalgic historical revisionism. The age of Pixar may not be as golden as that of 1930's and 40's Disney, but it's an estimable run, especially since each new Pixar feature has reached deeper and higher in thematic and aesthetic preoccupations. Like classic Disney, Pixar films are invariably traditionalist, with stories of familial and social retrenchment, but they're also witty and playful, fresh in both graphic and written line. One clunker won't shut down or even threaten the factory line, but here's hoping that as this onetime scrapper becomes increasingly entrenched and establishment, it keeps its geeks-and-freaks flag flying.
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