REVIEW: Cars
Cars
Dir John Lasseter. Starring Owen Wilson
Has anyone honestly ever seen a car and thought how alive it seemed? We might as well think of a lawnmower or coffee blender having a personality. This is the biggest problem with Pixar’s latest animation. The Toy Story films, A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc — these all work conceptually because treating the characters as quasi-human is natural. But Cars is different, because such an investment is not instant.
After all, as the title lets you know, the machines themselves, rather than the characters, are the film’s principal attraction and focus. And they are beautiful: in the first few scenes, at least, their movements have just the right mixture of cartoonish plasticity and realism. The trouble is that the film often becomes so realistic as to be tedious.
The only thing that differentiates the cars from reality in several sections is the presence of enormous eyes in the windscreens, and huge mouths in the bumpers. Most of the time, too, the cars are either not moving at all, or moving very slowly. This is disastrous. The movement of cars has been given a terminal banality by hours spent on motorways. Quite why anyone thought it would be a good idea to make a film in which the viewer does nothing but this, I shall always fail to understand.
For, despite one or two fairly neat jokes, and ace music, Cars is a pretty traffic jam and nothing more.
8th Jun 2006