I have often heard people refer to Cars as their least favorite Pixar movie, and not just in the current thread about Pixar movies. Beyond just thinking it’s the worst Pixar movie, many people actively dislike it.
I don’t get the hate for this film - I thought it was fun. A good story, good characters, good animation, lots of funny little jokes (especially if you are into cars). It wasn’t the best movie Pixar ever made, but it wasn’t bad.
Is it just people who think cars are evil, planet-destroying death machines or what?
Obviously liking or disliking a movie is a matter of subjective taste. But I didn’t like it for many reasons. First of all, the “hotshot comes to a little one-horse town and is initially snotty but is charmed into staying and helping them” plot is trite, and a rip-off of Doc Hollywood. Secondly I loathe Larry the Cable Guy, “blue collar humor” of the artificial, mainstream variety, and rusty old tow trucks from the 1950s. I dig heavy-wreckers like the big green “Raja” in Heat, but an old piece of junk like “Tow-Mater” just doesn’t do a thing for me. What an utterly stupid moniker! The desert setting was aesthetically unappealing. I don’t want to look at tan, brown, tan, brown, tan, gray, tan, brown and tan all day long, baking in the hot sunlight. I want to see some goddamn greenery. I thought the “faces” on the cars looked stupid and ugly. I thought the characterizations of the cars were unbelievably cliched and cheesy (a low-rider with a Mexican cholo accent? Come on.) What can I say, I thought it was a crappy movie.
When has lack of originality ever stopped a film from being decent entertainment?
And it must be pointed out that it’s only superficially like Doc Hollywood, which in itself is a very ordinary film and is fair game for remaking, as an animated film, and aimed at a new audience.
I think Cars is the least of the Pixar films because it relies on car culture too much, especially NASCAR and Route 66, both of which are very American and limited in their appeal.
But I still find it entertaining; I think the characters are great, and the visuals are breathtaking.
Not to be one of those type of “me too” types of people, but what Argent Towers has said, nearly word for word. (The one difference: I thought the desert scenery was pretty well-done. Like other computer animation studios, I’ve felt that Pixar sometimes builds its stories and story environments to show off developments in animation techniques. Something tells me they had probably made some advances in animating dust and such. Whatever the case, the geek in me who loved Tron sat in awe watching the realistic dust and such).
Storywise, it’s not a bad movie by any means, and from any other animation company (including Disney proper) it’d be astounding. But it’s like getting a B- project from an A+ student; it’s above average but you know that Pixar is capable of better. The reliance on “blue collar” humor felt a little close to the Dreamworks method of using pop cultural references for cheap jokes. Tow-Mater was one step away from that dreadful “They call me Tater” joke. Ugh. And, like Argent said, that kind of humor is forced and artificial. In the context of a comedy night, fine, but it’s misapplied here.
It’s been a brilliant longterm success in ways that other, more highly acclaimed Pixar films haven’t been, and for that I have to give them tons of credit. It’s been incredibly marketable to both children and adult car fans… the licensed products continue strong (taking a sizeable chunk of the die-cast car market, for instance) while more recent efforts fizzle. Not too many WALL-E toys out there, but endcaps full of Cars model vehicles still hang on at toy stores and discount department stores. It-- like the Buzz Lightyear branch of Toy Story-- has managed to tap into the boys market, too. While any gender can enjoy the products, boys seem to gravitate to Buzz and Cars more than gender-neutral Pixar properties. It’s also the closest to a boy’s license range that Disney has right now, so it tends to get promoted on equal footing with the very successful girl’s ranges of Disney Princess and Disney Fairies. All of this has kept the film in the public eye for far longer than, say, Ratatouille.
Anecdotally, among friends with kids, Cars is far and away the favorite film of the kids-- not just the favorite animated film, or favorite Disney/Pixar film. It’s a kids’ movie… the people who don’t like it invariably aren’t kids.
It was “OK” , but it did not delight me the way Pixar usually does. It was more overtly paint by the numbers formulaic than any other Pixar movie I can recall.
It is definitely my least favorite Pixar movie. I’m not sure why, and I can’t give a supportable argument to bolster my position, but for some reason it really pissed me off. Somehow I just found it very annoying. Maybe the overall hick-ness of it all?
It was one of my least favorite Pixar movies, but Pixar movies are great, so that’s not an insult in itself. I saw this movie last month and actually enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. It took me a while to get into the storyline, but the whole Route 66 concept was very moving. When they showed the montage of the cars preparing for the opening of Route 66 and all their hopeful faces as the anticipated new visitors (which never showed), I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. They did a really good job of painting that tragedy.
There was also a featurette on the DVD we watched which included interviews with some of the people living in the original towns that were bypassed by Route 66. A wrinkled old shop owner commented that after the construction of Route 66 (and the loss of his customer base), ‘‘When something like that happens, well, you don’t see a reason for getting out of bed any more.’’ You don’t really realize how based in reality Cars is until you watch that featurette. The film is about more than just a big-shot car learning to love in a country town, it’s about a real economic phenomena that occurred as a result of highway construction, and I believe it was crafted to be as accurate as possible. I thought the landscapes were beautiful and though there were definitely some cheesy accents, I think people easily forget how diverse certain parts of our country are, even in the sticks. Love it or leave it, there are towns like this all across the country. Cars is a distinctly American film, with a distinctly American sensibility, and I think it’s less of a clishe than people give it credit for. Even the characters that seemed overly simplistic (like Tow-Mater) are based on real people.
I don’t hate it, but it is one of only two Pixar films I have made no effort to see. I am not a car buff by any means, and neither the characters nor the story held any appeal to me.
Hey Student Driver, nice analysis of the marketing aspect. It sounds as if you work in toy retail.
I enjoy the Blue Collar Comedy tv shows, but not so much I want to see Larry the Cable Guy dropped undigested into the middle of a movie. (Well, digested a little bit, since the Cars character was less dimensional.)
It’s tempting to say I don’t accept human emotion coming from mechanical objects --didn’t care for WALL-E either-- but the original Luxo Jr. short was effective. (But maybe Luxo wouldn’t have been convincing if it had tried for complex feelings.)
Anyway, I didn’t like the big eyed cars and thought the lead character was Tom Cruise-ish and annoying (even after his transformation.) The lack of humans in the film bothered me; did the machines manufacture themselves? It seemed fudged.
The spiritual lesson of humility and the learning from a shabby old master were paint by number.
Actually, after Cars came out, my friends and I amused ourselves by joking about how formulaic the whole anthropomorphic-objects-with-stunt-casted-voices and stereotyped personalities thing was, and ultimately conceived a parody film of it, which we called Money. It was about various random denominations of paper and coin currency from around the world, who were about to be phased out in favor of newer, slicker versions. The rag-tag team of money - including a wise old $5 Lincoln bill, a spunky Mexican dollar with the voice of a cholo, a snotty but good-hearted Franc who’s constantly bickering with an English Pound, and others - would assemble to wage a guerrilla war against the evil World Bank, led by the villainous Credit Card (who ultimately threatens the existence of all cash) with a plan that’s SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK!
I think cars are evil, planet-destroying death machines, and I liked it. But then I grock Route 66 nostalgia and the whole airstream aesthetic. Also, I was unfamiliar with Larry the Cable Guy, so Mater didn’t really push my buttons the way it seems to for Americans.
I didn’t even watch it. I am not a car bluff, and I don’t imagine myself driving one anytime soon, and the premise is totally lost on me (being not an American). I don’t know if it is good or bad as a movie, but it’s didn’t interest me to watch it in the first place.
Other than Cars I have watched most of recent Pixar’s flicks except Toy Story 1 and 2. Oh, um, except Up. Was that by Pixar?
I went to see it with my nephew, he loved it but I was bored as hell.
I don’t like cars in general, like even less anthropomorphic cars, and I felt it was too long, on top of that. I actually slept near the end.
MrDibble - how about Armour, a movie about suits of armour in a museum that come alive at night? There would be a tough, arrogant suit of German Gothic plate c. 1480; a comically pompous Maximilian suit with an over-the-top accent; a foppish, slightly effeminate suit of Greenwich armour from the Elizabethan period (voiced by Hugh Grant?); a haughty, swashbuckling French cuirassier’s armour from the early 1600s; and of course a Japanese Samurai, who is always attempting elaborate, flashy sword techniques but failing in a comical manner and crashing into a wall or something… and maybe even a suit of Mughal mail-and-plate voiced by that Indian guy from The Forty Year Old Virgin.
The museum would get broken into one night by evil, history-hating thugs, and with the local police tied up at a high-profile terrorist incident across town, it would be up to these obsolete suits of armour to save the day with A PLAN SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK! And of course the Samurai would wind up with one of those Kimono-wearing manikins from the East Asian section, and the French cuirassier would finally win the heart of the beautiful noblewoman in the Rigaud painting he has been pining after…hmmm…hmmm…
Do you think it could show the burglars’ brains being bashed out with a pole-axe and keep the PG rating?
Hm. I couldn’t care less about cars (considering them solely useful and interesting in that they get me from one place to another), and I really like Cars. I do agree it’s a retread of Doc Hollywood, which is probably a retread of dozens of movie elements, but IMHO, who cares if something is a retread, if it is done artfully?
Apparently (from comments in this thread) it helped a lot that I had absolutely no notion of Larry the Cable Guy and was dimly aware of something called the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, but had never seen any of it. Mater was just a fun silly character.
For the record, my least favorite Pixar is Ratatouille. I think Cars is pretty good - not Toy Story or Up, but fun.
Did the Cars world spontaneously spring into existence ca. 1905? If not, what did the generation before Lizzie look like? Were they horses? How are cars born? How do they mate? So long as spare parts are available, why would they ever die?
Fun to watch, but this one just pegged the suspension-of-disbelief-o-meter.
For crap sake, people! These (Disney/Pixar) movies are written for kids! Have you ALL forgotten how to be a kid and not analyze everything to death! This movie was awesome!