You seem to be taking this awfully personally. It’s just a movie. Some people didn’t like it as much as you did. Some people were bothered by aspects of it that didn’t bother you. There’s no reason to get angry about it.
That seems an unlikely reason for the film’s failure. Americans seem to be, in general, pretty well in tune with car culture. Far more so than they are with, say, marine biology. Yet that ignorance did not seem to harm Finding Nemo at the box office or in the critic’s reviews. I think the problem with Cars is more fundamental than that, as I explained above: it just wasn’t a very good movie.
Cars was by no measure a lost and found story. The protagonist does not lose something that he already had, quest to regain it, and in regaining it, learn to value it anew. It was a “fish out of water” story: the protagonist is taken from an enviroment in which he is comfortable and familiar, placed into another enviroment in which he is treated as an outsider, and in learning to adapt to that enviroment, comes to find it equally or more valuable than the world he left behind.
There’s nothing wrong with that story, of course. It’s been used a thousand times to wonderful effect. And it’s also been used a million times to indifferent or incompetent effect. Cars is an example of the latter. Even if we grant your contention that Toy Story and Cars have essentially the same plot, where Cars stumbles and Toy Story excels is in the execution of that plot. It’s difficult to describe exactly why one failed and the other succeeded without doing a detailed, side-by-side analysis of the two films: a lot of it is intangibles. I liked Woody and Buzz. I cared about them as characters, I felt bad when they has setbacks, and I was cheered when they succeeded. I had no such connection with Lightning McQueen. I didn’t care for him as a character, and I had no emotional investment in his adventures. The writers failed to involve me in the story they were creating.
Which is great, but it’s not enough to hang a movie on. A good movie needs, more than anything else, interesting characters. Then it needs something interesting for them to do. If Lasseter had spent less time on the automotive in-jokes, and more time on tightening up the script and bringing the characters to life, the end result would not have seemed so (if you’ll pardon the pun) pedestrian.
Yes, Cars was a labor of love. So was Plan 9 from Outer Space. The dedication of the creators does not automatically equate to excellence in the final product. Cars was not a good movie, for reasons wholly apart from the implausabilities of its central concept. Had Lasseter been able to deliver a screenplay as excellent as the ones that gave us Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, these implausibilities would have been gladly ignored by the audience. Absent that, the implausibilities become all the more glaring, and become the main topic of criticism of the film because it’s easier to say, “Why do the cars have seats in them,” than it is to articulate why Lightning McQueen failed to engage the audience the way Buzz Lightyear did.
