We’re ranking the films of Pixar Studios, leading up to the release of Inside Out.
Cars
Directed: John Lasseter, Joe Ranft
Writers: John Lasster, Joe Ranft, et al.
That Cars falls number 14 on a list of 15 films is a testament to Pixar in itself. Children love this film, and for good reason. It’s straight up sillier than most of the studio’s output, and what it lacks in subtlety and thematic richness, it makes up for in cars going really fast. Know your market, right?
What Cars does well, it does really well. Primarily, that is cheekiness mixed with nostalgia.The small-town life that the film celebrates makes a surprisingly effective backdrop for Cars. It certainly doesn’t hurt when Paul Newman is delivering the lines of the old-time sage Doc Hudson. Newman is big assist for Director John Lasseter, who steeps the movie in the Americana of the 1950s. There’s as much American Graffiti in this town as there is the Wonderful World of Disney.
Still, there’s no denying that Cars lacks the story, character, and most importantly, the innovation that defines Pixar.
The great problem of Cars is that cars and trucks are not convincing animated anthropomorphic characters. Pixar’s capacity to animate non-human characters has, by 2006, been essentially perfected. But an animated world inhabited only by talking machines just feels dead. I have always struggled to pinpoint that feeling, until reading Manhola Dargis’ review.
Here’s Dargis, in 2006: “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.”
The problem: there’s no biology. Lasseter, who prior to Cars directed Toy Story and Toy Story 2, avoided this problem completely in those films. There is so much life in Toy Story. Woody have a full humanity of their own (far more than Lightning McQueen and Mater), but the world beyond them also has life. There are people, animals, and green spaces. That’s all missing in Cars, where Lasseter seems more interested in the technical virtuosity of his film than in the weird automated world he’s created.
Thus, major set-piece and plot point scenes like this look incredible…
..but they do not provide the reward of even the smallest Toy Story moments.
What separates the success of Cars from the Pixar pack is not so much the movie, but the what the movie wrought. The franchise has spawned not just a feature sequel from Pixar, but two additional theatrical features from Disney (Planes 1 and 2) and countless additional variations-TV shows, direct-to-video movies, books.
The exploding franchise also created a monster merchandise campaign. This process, movie to franchise to merchandise, is standard procedure at Disney. But few non-princess themed films have had as much success as Cars. The film produced the most successful merchandising campaign of any Pixar property, earning over $10 Billion within five years of release. Pixar has Cars 3 in development, and it’s not because the first two were great achievements in filmmaking. It’s because wherever there are children, not far away is an object branded Cars.
Best Line: “Float like a Cadillac, sting like a Beemer.”
Line Trying the Hardest: “Where are ya? Shoot! You’re in Radiator Springs, the cutest little town in Carburetor County.”
Random movie industry footnote: Cars was the last Pixar film released on VHS, and the first released on Blu-Ray.
Primary Source of Racial Queasiness: Cheech Marin playing the low-rider Ramone
Ratzenberger: 
Credit Sequence Meta-Ratzenberger Moment: Mack, voiced by John Ratzenberger, praises his own previous Pixar characters in car form for their excellent voice work.
Best Animated Feature: Nominated. It lost to Happy Feet.
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