Except in that it’s part of a larger and longer tradition.
Let me get this off my chest. I have many a time (as recently as today) seen reviewers of movies, people-on-the-street, and even the erudite persons on this message board claim that Pixar’s ‘Cars’ is merely a remake of ‘Doc Hollywood’.
This irritates me something fierce.
A) I quite like Cars.
B) It is, if anything, ancestored by Brigadoon with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse and the Broadway play before.
C) Even beyond that the ‘fish out of water finds wisdom’ story concept goes back essentially forever in European legend and story tradition. To beat on Cars for being part of this tradition is equivalent to mocking Star Wars for being in on the ‘Hero of a Thousand Faces’ tradition.
No.
The lack of creativity that went into CARS sullies the otherwise solid reputation that Pixar has built. Yes all of their other movies are literally or even just thematic riffs on other movies… with CARS it just seemed lame and hackneyed.
I thoroughly enjoyed Cars, but I can still readily see that in storyline and theme and characters and tone, it’s pretty much a lot like Doc Hollywood. That’s simply a statement of fact. That Cars borrowed heavily from a lot of other, similar stories – and that Doc Hollywood did likewise – is also pretty much just true. I don’t quite get why the OP should be bothered by this. If you liked Cars, what does it matter if it’s similar to other movies or not, or if people point out those similarities?
I didn’t even see Cars, but everything about the trailers, advertising and promotion of the story made me think it was a child of Doc Hollywood, which I did see and only sort of liked, except for loving Julie Warner and the butcher at midnight telling Michael Fox that he was pretty handy with a knife. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t take my kids to see the one and only Pixar flick they missed was that I resented the obvious cheap manipulation.
I don’t even know that the plots were all that similar except for the “big-city-hot-shot-gets-an-enforced-chance-to-stop-and-smell-the-country-grown-roses” theme that was liberally trowelled all over both. But somebody made sure that the vibe of Cars advertising and promotion resonated with anybody who enjoyed Doc Hollywood, and they did it so shamelessly that even I, normally clueless when it comes to media trickery, resisted it.
