Cars

Introduction

The eighth film from the award winning Pixar studio sees the return of John Lasseter to the director's chair for the first time since 1999's Toy Story 2. Having anthropomorphisised toys, insects and fish, Pixar turned their attention to automobiles in this tale of an egotistical race car who finds himself stuck in a one horsepower town.

Lightning McQueen, (Owen Wilson) is a rookie on the 'Piston Cup' circuit and must travel to California for one final race to decide the championship. In the rush to get there, McQueen forces his transporter 'Mack' to drive through the night without rest and in his tiredness, Mack allows McQueen to fall from the back of the truck and, stuck in the middle of nowhere without headlights, he becomes lost.

Driving furiously to catch up with Mack, he finds himself on the wrong side of the law in the sleepy backwater town of Radiator Springs on Route 66, McQueen's ego takes a pounding when no-one knows who he is and they force him to stay until he has made amends for some reckless driving which destroyed the main street. During his stay he learns that there is more to life than racing and befriends the inhabitants including big hearted Mater and Sally, a lawyer escaping the rat race for a quiet life.

Video

I've seen some quality pictures on Blu-ray and this one is amongst the best, if not top of the pile. The animation is stunning and the level of detail is quite incredible - the final race has a crowd of 105,000 individually animated cars and you can almost see every single one. The design fits in with the subject of a world entirely populated and run by cars so Monument Valley becomes Ornament Valley, with the rock formations resembling tail fins, hood ornaments and other car parts. There are many clever design features of the world which include bugs are mini VW Beetles and vapour trails in the sky take the shape of tyre tracks.

*The pictures contained in this review are for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect the image quality of the disc.*

Audio

The Dolby Digital 5.1 EX and TrueHD mixes are excellent and, like the visuals, superb during the race sequences. The HD track obviously has the edge with a higher bitrate but the EX soundtrack is more than adequate if you don't have the setup to handle HD audio.

The voice casting, as always with a Pixar film, is perfect: Owen Wilson's southern drawl suits his character down to the ground, Paul Newman's grizzled 'Doc Hudson' is excellent as his foil and stand-up comic Larry the Cable Guy and Pixar regular Bonnie Hunt provide solid support as 'Mater' and 'Sally' - the 'buddy' and 'love interest' characters. Just as Shrek had different voice actors for the US and UK markets, there is one change for the UK release, with Jeremy Clarkson providing the voice of Harv instead of Jeremy Piven. I didn't like the changes in Shrek and I'm not completely enamoured with this, but Clarkson is a distinctive voice and clearly suited to a movie about automobiles.

Although he composed the fine score, there are no songs sung by Randy Newman and the soundtrack is comprised of songs by original recording artists such as Sheryl Crowe, Kenny G and Chuck Berry.

Extra Features

When you get to the menu, you are presented with the rather cryptic choices of Play Movie, Explore Radiator Springs and Tour Pixar Animation Studios. What's wrong with a simple list containing all the extras, scene select and setup? This is the only downside to a fine package of extra material that makes up for the DVD which was seriously lacking in this department.

Like the DVD, you have the animated short that preceded the film in cinemas, One Man Band, the seven minute Mater & The Ghostlight short which explains Mater's brief mention of 'the Ghostlight' in the film and the epilogue that ran through the end credits is available to watch on its own here, removing the distraction. There are also four deleted scenes which are mainly sketches and not missing from the final edit and you still get the Inspiration For Cars featurette from the DVD which runs at just over sixteen minutes and explains how and why John Lasseter came up with the project and how they researched it, including driving along Route 66 and visiting the towns that had been 'forgotten' just as in the film. These are all upgraded to 1080p, which is a pleasant surprise as most releases would have just transferred it directly across at 480p.



Thankfully Pixar have put some effort into the Blu-ray release, most notably the Cine-Explore mode which incorporates two commentaries and PiP and featurettes by seamless branching. You can choose to watch this in different ways using the dashboard-like control either by selecting 'manual' and pressing enter when the lights for featurette or deleted scene flash, or you can put it in 'automatic' and these will play automatically when available. The two commentaries, one a solo effort by John Lasseter and the other by 12 members of the production team are very good and informative, with PiP content so, when Lasseter mentions several muscle cars, pictures of them pop up around the screen. This is also used for the production commentary which could have been very confusing but a headshot of the speaker pops up so you can keep track of who is talking.

This is a superb addition and there is barely a second of dead air and both commentaries are packed full of information and supplemented well by the extra material during Cine-Explore which stretch the running time to about 2 ½ hours. In addition there is Boundin' Cars which takes the short from The Incredibles and gives it a car makeover, showing it in a drive in theatre with Lighting and Mater watching it.

Keeping the film interesting is the Carfinder BD-Java game, where you have to identify certain cars when they pop-up and they are added to your 'showroom' if you do it correctly. You can then read about the vehicles, see them in 3D and the scene in which they appeared.

There is also the Disney Showreel which lets you select the three most visually impressive scenes but, given that you could skip to just about any point in the movie for stunning visuals, this is all but pointless.

Conclusion

Several years ago, Pixar seemingly had a monopoly on quality films that were also entirely computer generated, but with the Shrek films, Dreamworks have shown themselves capable of making well-written, beautifully animated movies which are both commercially and critically successful, Studio Ghibli continue to produce wonderful animated pictures and Aardman won an Oscar with the brilliant Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. That said, Pixar are the only studio to produce animated films of high quality, achieving both commercial and critical success over a 13 year (at the time of writing) period, with this year's WALL-E as one of their best.

Pixar have set the bar so high that anything less than another Toy Story 2 is almost a disappointment although, considering the animated mediocrity such as The Ant Bully, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Madagascar and The Wild that were released at a similar time, Cars is comparatively excellent. The animation and design of Cars is fantastic - I didn't think that the location of the eyes in the windscreen instead of in the headlights, which had hitherto been the rule for anthropomorphising vehicles, would work, but it does and the scenery in 'Ornament Valley' is beautifully realised. Even little touches such as the bugs being 'Bugs' of the VW 'Beetle' variety add to the film's charm and appeal.



Following the Oscar winning The Incredibles was always going to be a hard act and, unfortunately, Cars fails to meet the high standard set by Pixar. Technically, it's a triumph with the best animation yet seen from the studio but, unlike their best films, Cars is arguably too long, particularly the second act, and compared to Pixar's other films, it's short on humour with few jokes or moments that will live long in children's memories.

When I saw this at the cinema I was disappointed by the lack of emotional depth but the more I watch it and understand just how personal a project this was for John Lasseter, a petrol head who took a break after Toy Story 2 to spend time with his family and bought a second hand RV to drive across the US on Route 66, discovering the towns left behind by the creation of the Interstates, the more I like it. Cars is not the best of Pixar but it is still a fine film and a superb Blu-ray Disc.

It was sad to hear that Joe Ranft, a Pixar stalwart and the man who co-wrote and co-directed Cars died during production but it was fitting that the film should be dedicated to him.