Since bursting onto the scene with 1995's Toy Story, Pixar has built a reputation better than just about any studio in Hollywood today. Their track record is far from flawless in my eyes, but I have always found something to like, even in their weaker efforts such as A Bug's Life or Monsters Inc. No streak can be held forever, and I think Cars will be the first real blemish in the Pixar library. A joyless, sappy, manipulative, and nearly laugh-free concoction that will appeal to only the most undiscriminating of children, Cars loses our interest long before its over due to a paper-thin plot that can barely hold up its nearly two hour running time, and a cast of underdeveloped or just plain unlikeable characters. Director John Lasseter (the Toy Story films) and his staff had an entire extra year to hammer out the kinks in the script, as Cars was originally set to be released last year. Whatever they did with that extra time, it certainly does not show through in the final product other than the visuals.

The bare bones plot is set in a fantasy version of our world where cars and other sorts of vehicles make up the world's entire population, even the insects. It centers on a cocky and arrogant racing car named Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) who has shot from rookie status to superstardom in less than a year, and is fast approaching his dream of winning the ultimate prize - the Piston Cup. The final race results in a three-way tie between Lightning, the long-time champ, and Lightning's equally cocky rival (Michael Keaton). A race between the three is set to be held in one week to determine the winner in California. On his way there, Lightning is separated from his transport truck (Pixar regular, John Ratzenberger), and quickly finds himself lost and off the Interstate. The back roads lead him to a long-abandoned ghost town called Radiator Springs where a small handful of colorful locals struggle to keep the town running. Lightning is arrested by the town's sheriff for speeding, and brought before Judge Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), who sentences the hot rod to repair the road that he damaged during his reckless driving. Lightning curses his luck at first, but the more time he spends in the quiet laid back town, he begins to see a different side to the local residents, finds a love interest in local Porsche gal Sally (Bonnie Hunt), and learns of a simpler time where people traveled by road to experience the world around them, not just to speed along everywhere in a hurry.

Like a lot of the animated films that have been released this year, Cars features next to no plot. It's tone is laid back, overly padded, and slow. In a way, I think this was the intention of the filmmakers, as the message of the film is to slow down and just enjoy life. However, Pixar makes a grave misstep in not only making the pace laid back, but tremendously dull and lifeless. Once Lightning arrives in the town of Radiator Springs, the movie grinds to pretty much a near halt as we listen to him whine over and over about how much he hates being there, we get some antics from comic relief sidekick, Mater the rusted tow truck (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy), and we get the typical wise old man with a past storyline, and an underdeveloped love story arc that seems to come right out of the blue because the six writers credited to the screenplay felt the movie needed one. Cars doesn't really have a plot, rather it is a heavy-handed message movie that bashes you over the head with its moral of respecting others and slowing down our hurried lives. While it's certainly a message worth preaching, Lasseter and company do absolutely nothing creative or original with it, opting instead to just give us scene after scene where the characters do nothing but spell the point out to us in a way that's about as subtle as a knee to the groin. Maybe I wouldn't have minded quite so much if the jokes featured in the film were funny, but aside from one brief sequence early in the film, I never laughed or even smiled. I found myself quickly growing bored with the "wacky" residents of Radiator Springs, and wanted to get out of there just as badly as Lightning McQueen did. (Unlike the character, however, I did not have a change of heart, and grow to love the town or its inhabitants.)

Maybe if the characters were interesting, I could have grown to love them, but it's impossible to like these wise cracking two dimensional vehicles that take up most of the running time. Most of the characters are one-note "joke" characters (a hippie bus who's addicted to organic fuel, a sassy jive-talking black car) that hold no personality whatsoever, and exist only to react to what's going on with Lightning. They're not characters, they're one liner-spewing bystanders that the screenplay can't be bothered to waste time with. Even the characters the script does focus on seem rushed and about as deep as a puddle that you would find on the side of the road. Lightning McQueen is the first lead in a Pixar film that I downright hated. He's a cocky, arrogant, unlikeable little jerk, and even when he has a change of heart, he's still impossible to get behind because he's just not very interesting. Same goes for love interest Sally, who seems to develop feelings for him for no reason whatsoever, making their budding relationship overly forced and hard to swallow. The voice acting, in turn, suffers because the actors are given very little to do. Owen Wilson and Bonnie Hunt lack chemistry together, and Larry the Cable Guy is just as annoying in animation as he is in real life. Paul Newman has a couple promising moments as the head of the town with a hidden past, but he's mainly used as a plot device, and a cliched wise sage who passes on info to Lightning with Yoda-like efficiency.

It's a shame that Cars is so underwhelming at its core, because does it ever look good. The movie is so brilliantly animated that it makes almost every other animated film this year pale in comparison. There are a number of stunning sequences, such as the opening race scene, and a sequence where Lightning and Sally take a ride through the local country. The attention to detail in the characters is stunning, and the backgrounds could easily be mistaken for live action at times. That's not to say the film always works. A fantasy sequence where Lightning and Sally try to picture what the town of Radiator Springs must have been like in its prime seems to hint at being touching and poignant, but falls short, because the film refuses to let us get to know the locals other than just comic relief. We don't care about the characters at all, so when the film tries to tug at our heartstrings, we watch with curious detachment and wait for the scene to end. The film also wastes its beautiful animation on a number of seemingly-endless music montage sequences set to different pop songs, and lame puns tied into cars. The movie features a number of celebrity cameos from the auto racing and television world, only they have been named after cars. For example, Jay Leno is now Jay Limo. If that joke made you laugh, you're just the right kind of audience Cars is looking for.

You know, I've had a bad feeling about Cars ever since I saw the first teaser trailer before The Incredibles back in 2004. I didn't want to believe it. I wanted Pixar to prove me wrong. Unfortunately, I must report that this is the first film released by them that failed to generate even the slightest reaction from me. The audience I saw the film with seemed to be in agreement, as the children in the audience were starting to get restless by the half hour mark, and absolutely no one but me stayed for the additional scenes that played right when the ending credits started to roll, opting instead to shuffle silently out of the theater in less than a minute without saying a single world. I have no doubt the studio will bounce back, but Cars is just a huge disappointment from beginning to end.

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