The Ride of Your Life!!!

Rating: 9/10 (28 June 2011)

"Toy Story" director John Lasseter has surpassed himself with another classic animated Pixar epic. "Cars" takes place in the world of competitive automobile racing. Like the "Toy Story" trilogy and "A Bug's Life," "Cars" occurs in a universe without humankind. Everybody in cars is some model of automobile or an accessory that furnishes help for an automobile. The cars have expressive eyes in their windshields and mouths in their front end grilles. They display a limited ability to gesture with their tires as if the tires were arms. As many as a dozen scribes, among them Joe Ranft, Dan Fogelman, Kiel Murray, Jorgen Klubien, and Phil Lorin, including Lasseter, have concocted a thoroughly entertaining romp in the NASCAR like circuit about antics of an independent but immature rookie race car named Lightning MacQueen. Clearly, our impulsive hero draws his name from immortal cinematic speedster Steve McQueen.
The story follows the arc of Lightning's life from the moment that he arrives on the scene as a race car champ until he learns some of life's important lessons. Primarily, Lightning will grow to appreciate the meaning of friendship. "Cars" belongs to that category of sports movies about a callow protagonist who learns the painful lesson that winning isn't everything. Somewhere along the road, Lightning has to sniff the roses and acquire values that eclipse those feelings of lone-wolf selfishness. Lightning (voice of Owen Wilson) makes a spectacular debut on the asphalt. At the same time, he alienates his crew chief and makes the mistake of not swapping out tires when he is ahead of everybody else, including the racing legend known as 'the King' (real-life racer Richard Petty)challenges Lightning at every turn. Miraculously, Lightning crosses the finish line in a three-way tie for the Piston Cup Championship. The other two cars that make it to the finish with him are the King and an obnoxious race car named Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton). Racing authorities decide to stage one more race to determine who is really the best. Lightning is in such a hurry to get to California that he makes his eighteen wheeler buddy who hauls him around to drive late into the evening.
During this long, late night haul, Mack the eighteen wheeler (John Ratzenberger) loses Lightning when its back-end disengages and our sleeping hero rolls out into on-coming traffic. Lightning has to dodge and swerve other autos and eighteen wheelers. Inadvertently, in his desperate efforts to catch up with Mack, Lightning takes a turn for the worst and winds up in the remote and largely forgotten town of Radiator Springs. Radiator Springs used to be on the main highway until the Interstate 40 bypass was constructed. Now the little town in the middle of the desert is slowly drying up. When Lightning roars into town, he is racing ninety to nothing to escape from a policeman. He gets tangled up in barbed wire and a statue and ends up destroying the asphalt-paved thoroughfare.
After our hero spends the night in the impound lot, he has his day in court. The town fathers—again a motley collection of cars—sentence Lightning to resurfacing the road. Although Lightning explains the urgency of his trip, the Radiator Springs authorities are just a little smarter than he is. The virtually friendless Lightning gradually makes friends, the best friend of the bunch is a tow truck operator called Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy)who follows Lightning's every move. Eventually, Lightning meets Sally Carrera, (Bonnie Hunt) a Porsche and they hit it off. She explains that she was once an attorney in Los Angeles who broke down in Radiator Springs and discovered the beauty of such an isolated town. Lightning labors under the misguided belief that he knows everything there is to know about race car driving until he meets Doc. Doc (voice of Paul Newman) is an old Hudson that won several Piston Cup awards, but an accident put him out of the racing business. Doc is reluctant to teach Lightning those life lessons that everybody needs to know to survive.
The animation is top-notch and occasionally could pass for the real thing. No, the talking cars never look human enough so that you don't notice that they are automobiles. Nevertheless, Lasseter and his scenarists have forged many interesting characters and given them some insightful dialogue. The humor is hilarious, especially the tractor tipping scene where Lightning and Mater sneak out to a farm late at night to scare sleeping tractors. The tractors here are the equivalent of cows. Clocking in a 116 minutes, "Cars" never runs out a humor and excitement. Adults will enjoy this opus about anthropomorphized automobiles much as adolescents because the writing doesn't stoop to conquer.