Car Wars

How many time have you watched a big-budget SF film and thought "those special effects look fake"? George Lucas laments this. He can spend a ton of money on digital special effects, and yet people care more about his muppet, Yoda, which clearly is fake. Why is one form of fakery more acceptable than another?

Part of the answer is the bandwagon effect. Sure, old stop motion King Kong was also fake. Using lizards dressed up as dinosaurs was fake. But for some reason, we can't deal with digital fakery.

Unless.

Unless, that is, it's Pixar. We're willing to have digital effects make cartoons look more realistic. Indeed, one reason we'll probably never go back to conventional cartoons is that digital special effects for films we used to call cartoons are getting awfully realistic.

In Cars, street lights, neon, desert landscapes, even the heated exhaust of a car looks realistic. Remember the podracing from the first Star Wars film. It's perhaps just as big a challenge to make cars that are essentially cartoons seem like heavy vehicles that can move.

Cars took its inspiration from a film that you wouldn't expect--Doc Hollywood. That tells the story of Benjamin Stone, played by Michael J. Fox, a plastic surgeon heading to California, getting stuck in a small town, having to work off community service, and itching to head to California. He learns to love the place.

Indeed, much of Cars is plenty predictable. Lightning McQueen is a brash rookie car who's about to be the first rookie to win the Piston Cup. He ends up in a tie with the king (a Richard Petty like car voiced by...Richard Petty), Chick Hicks, the car that always seems to be behind the king. A race is scheduled to take place in a week.

Lightning convinces Mack, the Mack truck, who carries him to his destination, to do an all-nighter. Mack basically falls asleep, and somehow Lightning, stowed in the back, falls out of the vehicle and finds himself in Radiator Springs. Due to a chase scene of sorts, he ruins the roads in this quiet desert town and is sentenced to repair the road before they'll let him go.

He discovers small-town life, which he hates at first, but grows to like. He even finds out the country doctor, Doc Hudson was once a star racer like McQueen, before being put out to pasture.

This film is way nostalgic for the 50s, from its neon, to its diner, to the story of small town people trying to do good. These are the kinds of towns that are idealized. It's not so much that cities are made to be evil or modernity is looked down upon, but it does say to pay attention to folks who aren't ready to look for big changes, who like taking things at a slower pace.

Although the film has moments that are predictable, from Mater riding around backwards, to Doc telling him to turn wheels left to go right for dirt racing, scenes that you know will come back later in the film somehow, it does so in such a charming way that it's not hard to be won over.

In particular, the characters all have a light touch. Lightning is brash, but is really a good car at heart. They don't want him to be too unlikeable. Even Chick Hicks, the "bad guy" of the film, is the ever-suffering runner-up, and is sympathetic. The King is made to be a champ that's starting to be over the hill, and provides the contrast to Doc, voiced by Paul Newman, who has been washed up.

Pixar films take so long to be made--six years is not uncommon, that the stories can be made a lot richer, especially in its details. Even the tone of the film, or how long it takes Lightning to learn his lesson can be stretched out so the believability of the transformation is that much more natural.

The folks at Pixar were even clever with the preview trailers from a year ago. How many people thought the picture, with Mater doing comic relief, gave a sense of what the story was really going to be about. By lowering expectations, Pixar surprises with a story of a small town that's trying to make it, a story that generally wins over even curmudgeonly city dwellers, so by the end of the film, you even like Mater, even as you thought Pixar had blown it.

I was noting, to my brother, that Pixar hasn't been quite as formulaic as Disney cartoons. Disney revived its cartoons with The Little Mermaid. It had been making cartoons all along, but none like the classic cartoons from the 50s.

That movie created the basic Disney cartoon: female protagonist must fight conservative father's old-fashioned beliefs to become the woman she wants to be. This is the basic plot of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, etc. Occasionally, they stray from the plot, but they end up using women as heroes quite often, which isn't a problem, really, but shows how often they go to the well.

The Pixar films haven't been as women-focused, actually. Indeed, nearly all its films center around men. Toy Story focuses more on Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Finding Nemo splits time with Marlin and Dory. The two leads in Monsters, Inc are voiced by Billy Crystal and John Goodman. The Incredibles split time between Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl.

There has yet, to my mind, to be a woman-centered story, which may be just that Lasseter has a harder time telling stories from women's point of view without getting too stereotyped (not that there aren't stereotypes floated galore in Cars from a sassy black car, to Italians, to an old geezer, to a bumpkin car).

Ultimately, I had a pretty good time, despite a predictable storyline, and much of that has to do with just looking at the quality of special effects, where you imagine that it wouldn't take much for Pixar to finally try making the leap to characters that look real, instead of making cartoons look real. The non-people parts (roads, lights, landscapes) are looking so good, that you wonder how long before they make that last step, and a good genre to do it is a genre that hasn't often worked well in film: fantasy. For example, a Pixar Hobbit might be a fantastic undertaking, something the company might be ready for in a few years, if not now. It has just the right mix of fantasy and humans to make it work (the problem may lie in its story).


We'll see what other magic is involved.

I rate this an A- for both likeability and goodness.