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July 20, 2006

Cars

Corvette Summer

By Horbal

Cars is the first Pixar movie to be released since the studio was acquired by Disney, but it's a watershed moment for the studio for another, more important reason--it marks their first significant departure from the basic premise of their first six full-length features.

From Toy Story (1995) to The Incredibles (2004), Pixar films have always been set in our world. Each plot unfolds in a contemporary American universe, inhabited by human beings. Each of these films explores a part of this world unseen in everyday life: Toy Story and Toy Story 2 imagine our toys coming to life whenever our backs our turned, A Bug's Life's drama occurs on a scale too small for our eyes to perceive, Monsters Inc. takes place in a universe that parallels and intersects with our own, Finding Nemo takes place under water, and The Incredibles fleshes out the secret lives of super heroes that walk amongst us.

In Cars, for the first time, human beings are absent. Except, of course, they're not. Here is a world in which the rock formations of the American southwest resemble tailfins, in which "cows" are tractors, and in which even the bugs are miniature Volkswagens with wings. But where did these cars come from? What God wrought these creatures in His (or Her) own image?

In one telling scene Radiator Springs' oldest resident Lizzie (Katherine Helmond) gestures towards a picture of her husband, the town's founder Stanley (like Lizzie a Model T Ford). This begs a question: what where Stanley's forefathers? Horses? As in last year's Robots human beings might be absent from this world, but their presence looms over it hauntingly.

The first six Pixar films are effective at fueling young (and young at heart) imaginations because they operate in much the same way. They make sense of the wider, unfamiliar world by imposing a child's understanding of human society on inanimate objects, animals, and nightmares. They take lessons from the World I Understand and apply them to the World I Don't.

And this is why these films are so magical: they reinforce a child's natural inclination to play make believe, compliment a childlike sense of wonder. Cars, though, is a bird of a different feather. Unlike its predecessors it entirely reimagines our world, and instead of making some part of it seem more real, more familiar it instead creates a strange, alien, and even disturbing universe of its own.

Much has been made of Pixar's decision to buck the tradition of equating an automobile's headlights with its eyes and to locate them on the windshield instead. The problem with this approach to anthropomorphizing the characters is typical of a problem with the film as a whole.

The headlights are typically used as eyes because the front of a car resembles a human face. By downplaying this similarity the animators are accentuating the differences between these car-creatures and the vehicles that we drive in our own world, just as re-landscaping desert plateaus emphasizes the difference between the geography of the world in the film and the corresponding area in our own.

This creative decision carries with it a number of unintended consequences. In previous Pixar films there was a certain logic to the characters' use of familiar words--they learned them from the humans. Here, though, the use of names like "Route 66" or "Los Angeles" are at best strained and at worst vaguely post-Apocalyptic.

It also draws attention to the limits of the filmmakers' imagination. To go so far towards creating a whole new universe but then to include such obvious gags as a Hummer as the "Governator" seems cheap. One-note jokes like this fill the movie and feel wearying like pandering to parents and guardians.

But if Cars represents some of Pixar's weakest writing to date, this shortcoming is almost entirely compensated for by some of the most breathtaking animation that I've ever seen.

The backgrounds are rich, sumptuous, even textural. Both the smallest details (small pebbles kicked up by cars racing around a NASCAR track) and the largest expanses of sky and the desert are rendered with astonishing beauty and realism. I'd like to draw attention to one moment in particular because it's the single most satisfying "cinephiliac moment" I've encountered in quite some time.

It occurs during the scene in which Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) is showing Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) the abandoned Wheel Well motel. There's a medium shot of the pair talking outside, "shot" from inside. Suddenly we become aware of a small insect (one of those VW "bugs") tracing lines in the dust at the bottom right-hand corner of the frame and of the window.

This only lasts for one brief second, but at that precise moment we become aware of the faint film of dust that covers the window which, in turn, makes us aware of the "camera" placement. It's a glorious, subtle, artificial "artifice" that made me swoon.

This moment demonstrates, I hope, the care and attention paid to the animation throughout the film. There are other, grander, achievements, such as the successful rendering of metal and speed, long the bane of animators digital and hand-drawn alike. It's with these little touches, though, that the filmmakers really steal your heart. And they are alone worth the price of admission.

With their next film Ratatouille, about a gourmet food-loving rat living in Paris, Pixar seems ready to return to the tried and true formula they've perfected by wondering what goes on under our table as we eat. It's for the best, I think. A Pixar film is ambitious enough already without the burden of trying to create an entirely original universe.

Cars doesn't quite succeed in its attempt to breath life into this new world. But were it so that all failures worked this well or were even half as beautiful! It's hard to hold anything against a film this good-looking.

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