Cars Review - Part 1
Jun. 10th, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThis review will be a two-parter, as I saw the movie Friday afternoon courtesy of the good folks at Piñata Party Central and will be seeing it Saturday night with the crowd from my sister’s school. Two different days, two different crowds, quite possibly two different reviews. But only one first impression. Be warned: this review is nowhere near objective and is at times personal enough to be extremely boring.
I have to say right off the bat that I was not terribly excited to see this movie. I don’t drive, I’ve never experienced the Great American Love Affair With Cars, I don’t care for racing (‘Who among us does not love Nascar?’ said John Kerry – well, me, for one) and I have no nostalgia for Route 66. All it had going for it was that it was done by Pixar, who are almost universally reliable. I wasn’t expecting much when I sat down in the theatre. I wasn’t expecting anything bad, I just wasn’t expecting anything at all. So it took me by surprise when the first sequence actually interested me – I’m still not sure why, but it was sprinkled with that magic Pixar dust that makes you forget you’re watching animate cars and just skips straight to the story. If they could bottle this Insto-Presto Suspension of Disbelief Powder they’d make a killing. Normally I’d be worried at this circumventing of sanity and detachment, but I go to movies with the intent of enjoying myself, so I’ll accept any trick they play on me that achieves this. It was also full of things that made it clear this movie was done by people who really cared about their work and put a lot of effort into it, people who really loved what they were doing, which won me over more than anything else. I work at a TV animation studio, I know we have deadlines and quotas and budgetary restraints and therefore nowhere near the kind of artistic luxury that those lucky Feature people have. I know that the majority of people I work with care about their work and put in as much attention to quality as they can, but corners have to be cut and deadlines met, so work only has to be good enough, not as good as possible, nor can it be laboured over in pursuit of improvement. Cars, oddly enough, rekindled my desire to work on features, a desire which I thought had been successfully stamped out by recent history and burnout, so I can’t hold too much against it in the long view.
I have to say, though, that this was my least favourite Pixar movie. In a way that’s like saying Almond Joy is my least favourite chocolate bar, because despite its relative value it’s still a chocolate bar and way better than, say, raisins – but the fact remains it’s at the bottom of my personal ranking of Pixar movies. It still had a better story and better character development than most animated movies I’ve seen recently (not that I’ve seen all that many) and even most of the live-action ones. That said, this was the first one in which I could start to see the bones of a formula starting to show: Hero’s hitherto hunky-dory life suddenly changes, enter cast of adorably eccentric characters, Hero changes in small but significant ways, Hero achieves something he didn’t know he needed to when his quest began... Okay, that fits lots of movies and books (even Going Postal) but the thing is that the plot and characters seemed a bit more transparent in this one.
Visually – once you get past the whole ‘everybody’s a car’ thing – it was quite nice. Pixar has a way of lighting things that gives such a sense of atmosphere and space ... luckily they didn’t also convey temperature, otherwise I would have disliked Radiator Springs as much as I dislike I-15 from San Bernardino to St George. But the scenery and the realistic attention to environments reminded me of nearly every summer vacation of my youth – little things, like the way rows of crops strobe past or the strata in hills bisected by the freeway, and big things like the feel of an offramp in the midnight desert or the sunset lighting up distant cumulonimbus over scrubland. These rang true, and it was amazing to see them depicted so truly by someone else.* Also amazing was how somehow – probably Pixar dust again – the desert never got boring. When you spend fifteen years of your life touring various deserts every summer, they get old fast, but I kept finding new things to look at and think ‘ooh, that’s nice.’ Nostalgia, maybe?
Characters ... well, they were serviceable. (Har har.) I never really liked any of them. Lightning and Sally and Doc, well, they had their parts to play, and were sympathetic in that way main characters are, and the supporting cast was all ... very ... supportive, but ... meh. Maybe there just weren’t any that resonated with me. Not much chemistry between them, either.
The story, as I mentioned, was good. Not personally involving, but enough to keep me interested in what was going on, and considering it was about cars, that was an achievement.** There were some very nice sequences, my favourite of which was probably Tipping Tractors ... it was oddly hilarious, but mostly it was a piece of self-contained storytelling that I never ever would be able to do myself, so there was a healthy helping of awe along with the laughs. As a whole, though, even where it wasn’t formulaic it was often predictable, so while it was well-constructed it wasn’t exactly dazzling or really all that satisfying, for me. I like to have my emotions jerked around by a story, but when I can tell what’s going to happen it just doesn’t have the same effect.
Animation was, of course, brilliant. Those Pixar people sure know how to give themselves a challenge ... I mean, cars have even less acting potential than fish. At least fish have fins they can gesture with and can turn their head from side to side, and can move their whole body around for expression. I wasn’t crazy about the big windshield eyes at first, but then I realised that squishing both pupils to one side was a handy way to cheat a head-turn; you can’t do that with headlight-eyes. Some of the little things they did with wheels and things, too, were very nice touches. I know very little about CG but what I’ve gleaned from working on CG shows makes me really wonder how they rigged those cars to do all that they did.
Stay for the credits! There’s a bit of funny stuff (the Ratzenberger series is particularly amusing) but there’s also the Joe Ranft memorial ... it may not be as magnificent as he deserves but it’s probably the most they could expect an audience to sit through when 98.5% of them probably have no clue who he is. And he was killed in a car crash. What is that? Ironic? Twisted? Literary? Whatever else it may be, it’s cruel.
Well, there we go, part 1 complete ...
*It was actually a similar experience to watching Spirit, though possibly better in a way because they didn’t hurtle from Bryce Canyon to Yellowstone in five minutes on horseback and thus immediately discredit the movie in my annoyingly realistic mind.
**If it had been about tall ships, now...
I have to say right off the bat that I was not terribly excited to see this movie. I don’t drive, I’ve never experienced the Great American Love Affair With Cars, I don’t care for racing (‘Who among us does not love Nascar?’ said John Kerry – well, me, for one) and I have no nostalgia for Route 66. All it had going for it was that it was done by Pixar, who are almost universally reliable. I wasn’t expecting much when I sat down in the theatre. I wasn’t expecting anything bad, I just wasn’t expecting anything at all. So it took me by surprise when the first sequence actually interested me – I’m still not sure why, but it was sprinkled with that magic Pixar dust that makes you forget you’re watching animate cars and just skips straight to the story. If they could bottle this Insto-Presto Suspension of Disbelief Powder they’d make a killing. Normally I’d be worried at this circumventing of sanity and detachment, but I go to movies with the intent of enjoying myself, so I’ll accept any trick they play on me that achieves this. It was also full of things that made it clear this movie was done by people who really cared about their work and put a lot of effort into it, people who really loved what they were doing, which won me over more than anything else. I work at a TV animation studio, I know we have deadlines and quotas and budgetary restraints and therefore nowhere near the kind of artistic luxury that those lucky Feature people have. I know that the majority of people I work with care about their work and put in as much attention to quality as they can, but corners have to be cut and deadlines met, so work only has to be good enough, not as good as possible, nor can it be laboured over in pursuit of improvement. Cars, oddly enough, rekindled my desire to work on features, a desire which I thought had been successfully stamped out by recent history and burnout, so I can’t hold too much against it in the long view.
I have to say, though, that this was my least favourite Pixar movie. In a way that’s like saying Almond Joy is my least favourite chocolate bar, because despite its relative value it’s still a chocolate bar and way better than, say, raisins – but the fact remains it’s at the bottom of my personal ranking of Pixar movies. It still had a better story and better character development than most animated movies I’ve seen recently (not that I’ve seen all that many) and even most of the live-action ones. That said, this was the first one in which I could start to see the bones of a formula starting to show: Hero’s hitherto hunky-dory life suddenly changes, enter cast of adorably eccentric characters, Hero changes in small but significant ways, Hero achieves something he didn’t know he needed to when his quest began... Okay, that fits lots of movies and books (even Going Postal) but the thing is that the plot and characters seemed a bit more transparent in this one.
Visually – once you get past the whole ‘everybody’s a car’ thing – it was quite nice. Pixar has a way of lighting things that gives such a sense of atmosphere and space ... luckily they didn’t also convey temperature, otherwise I would have disliked Radiator Springs as much as I dislike I-15 from San Bernardino to St George. But the scenery and the realistic attention to environments reminded me of nearly every summer vacation of my youth – little things, like the way rows of crops strobe past or the strata in hills bisected by the freeway, and big things like the feel of an offramp in the midnight desert or the sunset lighting up distant cumulonimbus over scrubland. These rang true, and it was amazing to see them depicted so truly by someone else.* Also amazing was how somehow – probably Pixar dust again – the desert never got boring. When you spend fifteen years of your life touring various deserts every summer, they get old fast, but I kept finding new things to look at and think ‘ooh, that’s nice.’ Nostalgia, maybe?
Characters ... well, they were serviceable. (Har har.) I never really liked any of them. Lightning and Sally and Doc, well, they had their parts to play, and were sympathetic in that way main characters are, and the supporting cast was all ... very ... supportive, but ... meh. Maybe there just weren’t any that resonated with me. Not much chemistry between them, either.
The story, as I mentioned, was good. Not personally involving, but enough to keep me interested in what was going on, and considering it was about cars, that was an achievement.** There were some very nice sequences, my favourite of which was probably Tipping Tractors ... it was oddly hilarious, but mostly it was a piece of self-contained storytelling that I never ever would be able to do myself, so there was a healthy helping of awe along with the laughs. As a whole, though, even where it wasn’t formulaic it was often predictable, so while it was well-constructed it wasn’t exactly dazzling or really all that satisfying, for me. I like to have my emotions jerked around by a story, but when I can tell what’s going to happen it just doesn’t have the same effect.
Animation was, of course, brilliant. Those Pixar people sure know how to give themselves a challenge ... I mean, cars have even less acting potential than fish. At least fish have fins they can gesture with and can turn their head from side to side, and can move their whole body around for expression. I wasn’t crazy about the big windshield eyes at first, but then I realised that squishing both pupils to one side was a handy way to cheat a head-turn; you can’t do that with headlight-eyes. Some of the little things they did with wheels and things, too, were very nice touches. I know very little about CG but what I’ve gleaned from working on CG shows makes me really wonder how they rigged those cars to do all that they did.
Stay for the credits! There’s a bit of funny stuff (the Ratzenberger series is particularly amusing) but there’s also the Joe Ranft memorial ... it may not be as magnificent as he deserves but it’s probably the most they could expect an audience to sit through when 98.5% of them probably have no clue who he is. And he was killed in a car crash. What is that? Ironic? Twisted? Literary? Whatever else it may be, it’s cruel.
Well, there we go, part 1 complete ...
*It was actually a similar experience to watching Spirit, though possibly better in a way because they didn’t hurtle from Bryce Canyon to Yellowstone in five minutes on horseback and thus immediately discredit the movie in my annoyingly realistic mind.
**If it had been about tall ships, now...
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Date: 2006-06-12 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-12 05:06 pm (UTC)I didn't even know there were "sponsored accounts". How does that work? I really hope I didn't put you to too much trouble, although it WAS a lot of fun to hear you.
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Date: 2006-06-13 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-14 06:13 am (UTC)