Try turning right to go left!

Rating: 10/10 (10 July 2006)

With as many phenomenal films on their resume as Pixar has, it is hard to believe that they can keep up the level of quality one film after another, and if you are waiting to see what will be the film that will be the first stumble from them, keep waiting because Cars is not it. Just when you think they must be running out of ideas by now, they come out with something like this and it blows me away every time. I watched Cars having never heard anything about it beyond the not very informative billboards that are plastered all over Los Angeles.
The thing that I kept thinking to myself as I watched this movie is that if you took someone from, say, 1985, and showed them this movie, they would be absolutely astounded at how far animation has come. If you took someone from 1950 and showed them this movie I don't think there is any way you could convince them that the movie is animated at all. The animation is so real that there were times when I wondered if they mixed in live action shots.
I love the way the movie mixes the super-fast culture of stock car racing with the culture of a sleepy town which has become forgotten because a freeway was built nearby, taking all of the traffic away from the town and letting entropy take its course. Kind of like what happened to the Bates Motel, right?
Owen Wilson is the perfect person to voice the cocky Lightning McQueen, an up and coming stock car that is well on its way to winning a much sought after sponsorship. An unfortunate series of events, however, leaves him stuck in the charmingly named Radiator Springs, repaving their road after losing control of his throttle, so to speak, and thoroughly destroying it. He begins by thinking of them not as the little people, but as the microscopic people, not worth his time, energy, or even a thought. The process by which his views of these simple people form the plot of the film, and it is a highly entertaining ride.
Larry the Cable Guy voices Mater, the town's rusty tow truck, and he steals the show from beginning to end. I got into listening to Jeff Foxworthy tapes and CDs when I was a kid living up in Diamond Springs (near Placerville, CA), and from there got into the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, of which the only two that I found really funny were Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. The guy with the mustache and goatee and the guy that was always smoking and drinking got real old real quick. My question at this point is, what else is there for Larry the Cable Guy to do in the movies? I would love to see (or at least hear) more of him, but he doesn't seem to have a lot of range at this point.
I think that the most important thing that makes this movie good, besides the animation and wonderful performances, is that there is depth to just about all of the characters. The amount of backstories that are smoothly provided is astonishing, and it gets you that much more into the movie. Also, in keeping with Pixar's image of not being able to curb their own overflowing creativity, the movie opens with another charming short film and, possibly my favorite part of the entire movie, ends with the characters from the movie watching excerpts from past Pixar movies, in which all of the characters are now vehicles of some sort.
And one more thing, I would like to nominate the scene with the Italian-speaking Ferrari's as one of the single best scenes in any Pixar movie!