Cars 2
Pixar in the 20th century was the new kid on the block, always offering eye candy animation with an equal payoff for kids and adults alike. Pixar in the 21st century shines but for the most part with a slightly dimmer bulb. Case in point was last year’s lauded Toy Story 3, which I found a dull repeat of the previous TS installments.
But a lot of others in the known universe went gaga for TS3 even to the point of listing it on a top ten movies list to the exclusion of really good (non-animated) film like Winter’s Bone or The Town. These same geeks consider Cars to be one of Pixar’s lesser films.
I hardly consider myself an iconoclast for considering Cars among the best Pixar films ever. The way Cars presented the past and its influence on the present was heartfelt. Or the wonderful evocation of an alternative reality Highway 61 and a rocky mountain formation that combined a big sky Arizona landscape mixed with the Cadillac Ranch. Plus there were several scenes set at night that depicted how it actually looks when you’re driving at night. For instance, modern camera technology cannot photograph things like stars and distant car lights, yet Cars depicted just that.
So it’s no surprise that I totally embrace Cars 2 for not only continuing to present animation that occasionally appears photo-realistic, but also for actually coming up with a story that’s not a thinly veiled version of its previous incarnation. Of course the plot is hardly astoundingly fresh since it’s a James Bond movie with British spy cars voiced by Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.
Cars was really about Paul Newman and Owen Wilson but Newman died so his character is just a name on the wall and Larry the Cable Guy’s character of Mater is the reluctant lead with Wilson playing second fiddle. George Carlin also died in the interim so Lloyd Sherr voices his VW Van hippy car character.
Cars 2 looks so sleek and shiny it’s like staring at a new car that just been waxed – not a bad thing. The storyline takes us around the world from Japan to the UK to Italy so there’s lots of room for spectacular views and international intrigue.
- Michael Bergeron
