I believe there is at least one baby car shown, in one of the racetrack scenes, cheering with delight as the jets fly over.
On the disk they have some dropped storylines and one of them had McQueen’s engine (and his personality) transferred to Old Bessie for his road-paving sentence. 'Mater “borrowed” his stockcar body which upset him greatly. 'Mater’s truck body was shown somnolent in the background while this was going on.
I’m not so sure. I recognized the sound they made when they zipped by and had the same thought about them being the only non-mechanical creatures in the film. I step-framed the moment they were in view and they’re awfully blurry – too much to tell whether they’re organic or not.
Speaking of self-references: The Pizza Planet Toyota pickup’s gotta be there somewhere – in a crowd scene, perhaps? And what about the Luxo Jr. ball?
I saw this movie for the first time a couple of weeks ago and promptly started asking the same questions. Thank you, Dopers, because now I know I’m not the only sane person in a loopy world.
I wondered the same thing about the movie Robots. Everything is made of metal, glass and plastic - there’s no organic life at all, so where does the cardboard come from for the boxes?
That was my idea for a Cars prequel. In the 50’s, Guido and Luigi leave their economically depressed town in Italy and visit the racing capitals of Europe (Le Mans, the Nürburgring, etc.) as travelling tire salesmen. Luigi would be the charmer, the fast-talking salesman. Guido would be the silent clown, in the tradition of Harpo Marx, and always with one eye on the pit crews, studying their every move. Eventually, they cross the ocean and head west, finding their way to emerging boomtown of Radiator Springs.
The teaser trailer for Cars also had the bug that gets smeared over Mater’s windshield that he gets all emo about, and then a whole swarm of gnats that McQueen runs into.
Terrifel, I love that setup.
I just wanted to welcome all y’all to my personal Hell.
The thing I’m curious about is that I’ve heard several people asking these questions about Cars. Why didn’t these people have simular difficulties with the idea of talking toys or insects or monsters or fish?
I’m glad you asked. The first draft my my OP addressed this issue.
Talking toys, insects, and fish make sense, because there are people around. It’s just that people are clueless and don’t notice that their toys play when they’re not looking, etc.
But in Cars, there are no people to have the wool pulled over their eyes.
Best. Idea. Ever. My hat is off to you.
Guido was my favorite character, with Luigi a close second. The only thing is, like most comic relief bit players, they are lovable but best taken in small doses. I’m not sure they can carry an entire story, but it would be a great 10-15 minute episode in a collection of Cars “featurettes”, with each episode focusing on a sidestory or background tale for each character. Mater already had his with the “Mater and the Ghostlight” DVD featurette. 
To those over-analyzing: You can’t be serious. If the premise of sentient cars (with giant cartoon eyes in their windshields and big toothy mouths where their grilles should be) actually causes you to question the reality of the humanless world they’re in, I pity you. Pixar’s whole schtick is to anthropomorphize things. I find it strange that I have to suggest the whole concept behind their work is to explore how things that aren’t human might behave if they could speak. Great, there were humans in the other films but none in Cars. The plot doesn’t allow for a symbiotic control relationship between man and machine. So what. Next thing you’ll be going “ohmigod, how does Luxo Jr. screw in his own light bulb if there aren’t any humans there to do it for him?” :rolleyes:
All this is cornflakes compared to the mental gymnastics I performed trying to unravel the details of the secret history behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I still don’t have that one totally worked out to my satisfaction…
Spoken like someone who’s only sat through the film fewer than ten times.
(No, I do not use the electronic babysitter. The boy is allowed to watch one movie during the weekend, if he’s been good. The rest of the time he’s either outside running around or playing with his cars or trains in the playroom.)
This is something I wrote for another site but didn’t quite finish, on this very subject, so pardon the bloggishness of the prose:
There are a number of reasons, but it all comes down to suspension of disbelief in the end. It’s very easy to anthropomorphize toys. Heck, most of them look like people, so it’s easy to imagine them acting like people, too. Insects and fish don’t look very human, but they behave in ways that are easily translated into human motivations. Many of them are already social animals, so it’s easy for us to imagine these social interactions in human terms. The monsters from Monsters, Inc. are probably the easiest thing to accept, as they don’t have any real-world analogue to compare to. Toy Story requires the audience to believe that inanimate objects have a secret life all their own. Monsters, Inc. merely requires that you accept that there are non-humans living in a non-human world, with only brief and occasional contact with our own. The only part of that concept that requires suspension of disbelief is the “brief and occasional contact” part of it, and that’s already been an element of 75% of all science fiction stories ever told. Cars, in general, are not as easily anthropomorphized. (and when they are, it’s usually in a negative fashion: “That fucking Mercedes just cut me off!”) There’s nothing in the behavior or appearance of cars that easily translates into human actions. The idea of two cars falling in love is a much harder sell than the idea of two toy cowboys falling in love. Real cars don’t have any sort of behavior that remotely mimics that.
Of course, none of that’s insurmountable. It’s possible to have a movie about talking cars that doesn’t bog the audience down in those sorts of questions. Cars was not that movie. Why? Because ultimatly, it simply wasn’t very good. The plot was stale and cliched. The characters were not very compelling. The writing wasn’t particularly clever. You could nitpick a lot of other Pixar movies in the same fashion that’s been done here: how the hell does a vegetarian shark even survive? What does he eat? Seaweed? But Finding Nemo was an amazing movie. The characters are well drawn and interesting, the plot exciting and inventive, the dialogue by turns witty and moving, that the audience is much more forgiving of the implausibilities of the concept. Pixar’s movies always require a degree of suspension of disbelief, but Cars required much more heavy lifting than their previous features, and gave much less reward for doing so. It is no surprise, therefore, that many in the audience declined to do the work, and instead amused themselves by picking the film’s premise apart.
That’s the funny thing: yeah, it wasn’t that good of a story. But to me, including humans always demands more of a suspension of disbelief than completely doing away with them (so the humans never notice a toy moving? Riiiiiiiight. Pull the other one.)
Cars, while having its ecological and functional questions even when I first viewed it, at least doesn’t have The Grand Illusion problems that movies that try to imply that they take place alongside humans in some secret world do.
Consider yourself lucky, my kids moved onto Barnyard. Bulls with udders [shudder]
I was thinking that it might be Asimov’s "Sally ", but that’s completely different.
I’m curious why the people who rake this film over the coals for being a logical fallacy feel the need to share the philosophical masturbation about how cars can’t exist in a world by themselves. Guess what? We get it. Yes, it’s a logical fallacy. I get it now, and I got it before I ever saw the first frame of the film.
I find it particularly ironic that ‘Cars’ was, by John Lasseter’s own admission, the one film he’d been working his way towards throughout his career at Pixar, and turned out to be one of their least popular films, probably due to overestimating the American public’s familiarity with car culture. I’m not sure where all the claims of the film having no story, or a bad story, are coming from either. What was the plot of ‘Finding Nemo’? A lost and found story, with fish. What was the plot of ‘Toy Story’? A lost and found story, with toys. What was the plot of ‘Cars’? Why, a lost and found story, with cars. From my perspective, if ‘Cars’ had a bad story, then the others had bad stories as well.
Anyone who knows anything about Pixar knows that Lasseter is a consummate car enthusiast. His office wall is filled with dozens of model cars. Virtually every frame of the movie was a tribute to all corners of car culture, past and present. The film is positively brimming with inside references and faithful homages to car culture and automotive history. It’s a bit sad that the fixation on “cars needing people to do things” prevents some from enjoying what was truly a labor of love for the folks at Pixar, and for Lasseter in particular, a dream come true.
Again, you’re missing the point. Miller expressed it quite well; it’s that the film was fairly blah that led those of us that are nitpicking it to start filling in these blanks. (and for the record, I didn’t think the film was bad, just the least of Pixar’s features) The problems are slightly larger than in other Pixar films, though not insurmountable. If they’d spent just a little more time on the details, it would have been a much better film for it. It may be a labor of love for Lasseter, et. al, but there’s no obligation on my part to find that entertaining.
Again - I liked the movie. This just started as an intellectual excercize for me after hearing, “I wanna watch the Mater movie!!” for the 25,000th time.
I haven’t seen anyone come into the thread and mention how awful the movies is, because it’s not an awful movie. There’s just this… disconnect about how this world must work.
See, I’m odd in that world full of sentient automobiles doesn’t bother me, as long as I can figure out its rules.