I Was Picturing Anthropomorphic Cars With Windshield Eyes Before It Was Cool.

Cars 2

2011

D: John Lasseter

**********

Pros: Clever action, Some funny parts, Good scenery

Cons: Bad story, Annoying protagonist, Questionable villains, Missed opportunities for automotive in-jokes

     If you ask anyone but me what the worst Pixar movie is, they’ll probably tell you that it was Cars 2.  If you ask me, I’ll say it was the first Cars, with A Bug’s Life being a close second.  Cars 2 is no animated masterpiece, but I definitely believe it to be a marked improvement over the first, if only because it’s more fun.  Perhaps when Cars came out, no one was ready for the prospect of a bad Pixar movie.  They had a preconceived notion that it would be good, so they gave it a pass.  As the truth sunk in, they became prepared to show the sequel no mercy, even though it ended up being more entertaining in a lot of ways.

     Now I’ll give Cars a short mini-review.  Everyone says it was basically Doc Hollywood with cars.  Aside from the ripped-off premise, nothing interesting happens in the movie.  The only part of it I found amusing was in post-credits sequence when Sarge (R. Lee Ermey) is giving off-roading lessons to some pampered city SUV’s.  I found it particularly amusing considering my feelings about the SUV craze.  I will note, however, that the credits also featured a painful metajoke in which John Ratzenberger’s character watches other Pixar movies and points out how he’s in all of them.  Outside some racing references, the movie tends to drop the ball on subtle inside jokes for car enthusiasts.  For example, Jay Leno cameos as the most unflattering depiction of a Lincoln Town Car ever.  Leno is actually a well-documented performance car enthusiast, but I guess someone at Pixar thought “Jay Limo” was too good a pun to pass up.  Maybe I’m just cranky because the movie managed to make a Town Car of all things look ugly.  Overall, it was a mediocre movie, and I give a 3/10.  I find it disappointing that this happened during 2006, which was actually a very good year for movies.

     Both Cars 2 and its predecessor are known for a character design that breaks away from the more common design for anthropomorphic cars.  Instead of having the cars’ headlights as their eyes, they put them on the windshield.  This is actually a design I always preferred, even though it was never popular before Cars.  Of course, nowadays everyone draws a cartoon car draws it Cars-style, and it’s getting a little tiresome.  I draw anthro cars with windshield eyes, but I avoid that specific style.

I also like to make them hot.

Now, Cars wasn’t the first to do this.  The design of the movie was directly inspired by the classic cartoon Susie the Little Blue Coupe, and I remember once seeing an evil pink limousine on Bonkers that had that had windshield eyes and one of Charlie Adler’s annoying female voices.  Overall, character design in these movies is something I find cute, but I have one gripe about it.  I generally picture the engine block being a muzzle, with the mouth extended along the bottom.  Instead, the movie has the mouths at the front of the cars, with actual human lips where the bumper should be.  I find that slightly off-putting. 

     In Cars 2 Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is challenged to race a world tour with an arrogant Italian Formula 1 car Fransesco Bernoulli (John Turturro) in an ultimately inconsequential subplot that seems cliched.  McQueen declines the race in order to spend time with his friends, but is driven into it when Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) needlessly provokes the rival.  McQueen obligates himself to race in this tournament while his girlfriend Sally (Bonnie Hunt) conveniently (more so for the plot than the audience) insists on his taking Mater with him.  While on the tournament, Mater stumbles into a spy mission, and becomes involved in a battle of good vs. evil.  I will note at this point that the movie respectfully acknowledges Paul Newman's death through the absence of his character, but does not do the same for George Carlin. 

     Making Mater the main protagonist of the movie has to be one of the most baffling decisions made by Pixar.  This was clearly done to appeal to children who loved the first movie and, surprisingly, Mater as well.  It’s okay to appeal to children, but never at the expense of the adults.  I’ve always found it surprising that children find characters like Mater and Jar Jar Binks funny.  Even a young child I never found such characters amusing.  Mater is an annoying buffoon played by an unfunny comedian.  He spends most of the time getting in people’s faces and bumbling through action scenes (the latter being a cliché I hate).  It’s not even until halfway through the movie when he realizes the seriousness of the situation.  He comes off particularly annoying at the beginning of the film, when he constantly interrupts Lightning and Sally during their alone time.  Actually, I can understand people hating this movie more than the first based on this character alone and the screen time he has.  Personally, I never found Lightning McQueen all that much more likable, anyway.  He seemed kind of douchey to me.  Mater is like that guy at work who tries to get along with you but doesn’t know how to keep his distance.  You know you shouldn’t hate him, but you can’t help it.  These characters I find less annoying on screen than in real life.  Unless they’re annoying you personally, it’s hard to hate someone who doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.  I’m angrier at the movie’s writers for putting the character on the screen than I am at the character himself.

    The conflict Mater finds himself in revolves around an evil plan hatched by the Lemons, who actually have a very understandable motivation.  The group consists of old, shoddily-made cars who have endured years of ridicule and mistreatment because of what they were.  Prior to the movie’s events, they had acquired a great find of offshore oil and they wanted to use their monopoly over this indispensable resource to gain the respect they’ve been denied.  Their leader, Sir Miles Axlerod (Eddie Izzard) poses as a wealthy socialite who has converted himself to electric and has developed a clean-burning alternative fuel that is compatible with internal combustion engines.  While the fuel is being publicly tested by the participants in the global racing tournament, the Lemons will use a special ray that will cause a car running on the fuel to malfunction.  The overall intent is to destroy the public’s faith in alternative fuels, thus securing their oil monopoly.

     The most obvious flaw with these villains is the same one we have with the hyenas in The Lion King.  It’s a group of people who have been systematically marginalized by society, and they have resorted to extreme measures to resist this.  Sure, if they’re actually doing something evil, they should be stopped, but there should also be acknowledgement that their actions were a direct result of their mistreatment.  The movie does make some half-hearted attempt to address this in an opening scene in which Mater helps an innocent lemon, who comments that he’s always polite to lemons.  Clearly, the only reason this scene exists is reassure us that the hero is not responsible for this situation (making him possibly the most likable character in the movie.  Seriously, Mater of all people) and that not all lemons are evil.  It’s more than what The Lion King did for the hyenas, but it still takes more than one tacked-on scene to address a movie’s unfortunate implications.  A better way to address this is to feature lemons among the heroes of the movie.  It would have made far more sense to make Rod Redline (Bruce Campbell) an actual lemon rather than a Mustang who can transform into a lemon to spy on the bad guys.  We could even have the villains call them traitors to their kind.  What makes it worse is that the good guys are constantly fighting these antagonists in action scenes.  While I’ve never had a problem with an unusually strong hero defeating average-strength villains, these villains are basically the automotive equivalent of disabled people.  Would you like Batman nearly as much if went around beating up people in wheelchairs?  That’s pretty much what’s happening in this movie.

     Another problem is that the Lemons’ plan makes no sense.  While ensuring a monopoly in oil may help them short-term, anthropomorphic cars would need a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuel more than we do.  It’s their food, after all.  Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Lemons to use their newfound wealth to subsidize research for alternative fuels?  The energy hunger crisis would be solved, plus the Lemons would have the respect they wanted without being the bad guys.  Another thing is that their plan would only result in their own fake alternative fuel being discredited.  The cars are still going to want to find an alternative fuel.  What’s more, it’s eventually revealed that alternative fuel they proposed is nothing more than gasoline with an additive meant to react to their death ray.  How do the other cars not notice this?  Wouldn’t they tell by what’s being put into their bodies and what’s coming out their exhaust pipes?  Isn’t there a third-party organization that tests the fuel?  How does no one notices this?  And once this is found out, it wouldn’t discredit alternative fuels.

     It’s also revealed that Axlerod faked his conversion to electric power, and that he is still an oil-leaking, gasoline-fueled Lemon.  How does he hide the fact that he still runs on gas?  Where does his exhaust go?  Does he have an onboard storage tank for it (I actually thought this would help the pollution problem when I was 9.)?  Why doesn’t he sound like a gas-powered car?  How come people can’t recognize him as a Lemon just by looking at him and telling what model he is?                                      

      The makers of the movie seem to be just as clueless about what cars are lemons as the cars themselves.  There could have been so much opportunity for subtle in-jokes for car buffs in this premise, but it’s nothing but missed opportunities.  The most noticeable example is how some of the bad cars included amongst the ranks of the Lemons aren’t even bad cars.  AMC Gremlins, for example, actually have a reputation for reliability and ruggedness and were an early proof that America actually could make a good economy car. Their infamy mostly comes from alleged ugliness, which I never I quite saw myself.  Frankly, I think they’re a damn sight better looking than most modern compacts. 

Of course, this wasn’t so much out of ignorance.  I think Pixar wanted to put cars like Chevrolet Vegas and Ford Pintos among the lemons, but didn’t want to provoke GM or Ford.  Therefore they stuck to mocking car companies who are no longer around to complain.  Of course, you could have included these cars among the Lemons while acknowledging that they weren’t bad cars.  Cars that were unjustly seen as lemons because of their looks would have the same motivation as the true lemons.  They could do the dirty work and heavy lifting, and there would be good potential for drama between the villains who were marginalized for erroneous reasons and those who weren’t.  I would have also liked to see some more affluent bad cars, like old Jaguars, as the bad guys.  The Aston Martin Lagonda, for example, was a turkey, but it had an elegant, lean and sinister look that would have been great for a villain.

       While I actually avoided seeing this movie in theaters, it actually has some great action scenes that make me wish I had.  The first scene, involving an explosive chase on an oil rig, was actually really, really good.  There’s even a bathroom brawl with cars.  That is cool.  Car chases, of course, have always been a staple of action movies, so I like how this movie actually takes advantage of the combination of action with cartoon cars.  I don’t know of many things that have taken advantage of this and I think Cars 2 at least deserves credit for this.  While the movie does borrow a lot of tropes from Bond movies, like armed cars, 60’s action sports car spy Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and sexy supercar spy Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), but it’s plot is still its own, so at least it doesn’t fall into the hole of being “James Bond with Cars.”  I must note that these supposedly smart spies seem oblivious to Mater's foolishness; McMissile simply believes, contrary to common sense, that Mater is just pretending he’s stupid as a cover.

     The scenery of this movie is good, particularly in the Oil Rig scene and in Japan.  There are also a couple funny jokes.  There is a rare moment of great metahumor when Mater runs into a car who has her eyes in her headlights in the more conventional style and freaks out.  Also, even though it was arguably inappropriate for a family movie, I admit to laughing at the Japanese bathroom scene.  I found some accidental humor in the fact that Thomas Kretschmann voices the evil Professor Zundapp in the same wooden, not-giving-a-shit manner like in every other movie I’ve seen him in.  I’ve never seen any of his more respectable movies so I don’t know much about him as an actor, but every subpar American movie I’ve seen him in he just doesn’t care.  It’s hilarious.  

    Cars 2 also seems to be one of the more violent Pixar movies.  The remains of a spy are shown after having been put in a compactor, multiple cars are seen getting destroyed in action scenes, and one of the characters is killed off in a rather brutal way.  He’s given the alternative fuel and then shot with the ray until he explodes, with the camera panning away to a screen showing a subtle reflection of it happening.  This scene is frustrating because the character is the American spy played by Bruce Campbell.  Right.  They make a movie where LARRY THE CABLE GUY is the main character, then they kill off BRUCE CAMPBELL the first chance they get?!  Were they trying to piss off people with this movie? 

     I know some people might by asking me, “Hey, Scorpio, you can’t just give this movie more credit than Cars and A Bug’s Life just because it has cool action scenes.”  Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.  I’d rather watch a bad movie with good action than just a bad movie (although I may concede that A Bug’s Life may be a little better).  Also, those movies were bland ripoffs, and I’d take dumb fun over a bland ripoff any day.  Don’t get me wrong, Cars 2 is a bad movie.  The plot is absurd and the characters can be annoying, but the movie has its moments.  It's better than Cars for the same reason the prequels are preferable to the Sequel Trilogy; it may be heavily flawed, but at least it's creative and interesting.  It has also come to my attention that Disney (sans Pixar) is planning a spinoff.  While the prospect of cartoon jet fighters is pretty awesome, it doesn’t look that good either.          

    

PS: For any British people reading this, I’d like to know if there are any high-ranking British officials who are of Czech descent.  Because I’m pretty sure I saw a Tatra T87 in the queen’s court.