Pixar Powered

Rating: 8/10 (24 June 2006)

The good - this wipes the slate clean of such pollutants as "Days of Thunder" and "Driven". The plot delivery is somewhere between "Doc Hollywood" and "To Wong Foo...", reconstructed for kids in the 6 - 10 years old range.
The best parts are the Pixar components, those being the effortlessly fastidious attention to detail, and the 'camera' movement. This is not a gimmick, but part of the visual storytelling.
Consider the way this movie handles memories: when Wilson's "car" remembers his trip through the turns on Rt. 66, the memory is shown from the car's-eye perspective, not as we first saw it from our 3rd person perspective. This is a clever effect, the best of its type I've seen since the BASE jump in "To Live and Die in LA". And consider that the entire movie is a 'memory' too (a computer program), and let that bake your noodle for a while.
The (slightly) bad - there's a bit too much 'Disney' in this, meaning the tendency toward saccharine characters, pop-culture innuendo and reliance on audience testing...smart movies make comments about movies, not usually about cultural trivia. You can see the 'Pixar' forces fighting back in the end title sequences where the Pixar back catalogue is reimagined as the Cars would see them, and those 'movies' are framed within a 'drive-in movie'.