Cars 2: A self-indulgent failure

Rating: Null/10 (27 June 2011)

As a lover of Pixar, it pains this reviewer to say that Cars 2 represents PIXAR'S BIG STUMBLE. Those masters of Story - who managed to restore the animated feature to its former glory as Serious Entertainment for adults and kids, alike - have just walked out in public with their fly open. I hope they learn from this mistake, retrace their steps, and recapture the craft of Story that made their other films the instant classics that they are...
Saw it at the drive-in on a double billing with Green Lantern - it wasn't an Oscar-worthy night. The theme was clearly anti-petroleum - the director, John Lasseter, traded in the grand themes of Americana and our love affair with cars for....a spy story? starring Mater and not McQueen? with lots of shooting and bombs? and "kid-friendly" lines like "KILL McQUEEN"? with Oil (the industry that, ironically, made our car- centric American lifestyle and culture possible) as the monolithically bad guy?
Where Cars 1 sometimes felt epic (remember those scenes of the painted desert landscapes of old Route 66 America?)- this one was noisy, rushed, and thin. Like being trapped inside a pinball machine for 90 minutes. The story felt "small" - worthy of the kind of straight-to-video fluff that Disney has been doing lately (e.g., Fox and The Hound 2). Instead of characterization, we got flatulence gags.
Oh, Pixar. Save the liberal politics for your private cocktail parties. Stop indulging yourselves at the expense of all of us regular folks who know full-well that solar panels, windmills, ethanol (a government- foisted conceit, which actually damages engines and causes grain shortages and price spikes as we burn food for fuel), etc., don't begin to approach the efficiency and power of petroleum. But that's all beside the point. We just came to be entertained, not to have our kids indoctrinated into your world-view, or for us adults to be lectured under the guise of "entertainment."
So, please, go back to basics, and all will be well. We still love Pixar.