This leads to the realization of a missed opportunity. I still have great respect for him and his work, and Cars 2 works particularly well now, instead of how it was before. number two in production.īut I have not come to slag John Lassiter.
Since then we’ve had Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and a Monsters Inc. This was said just before defending the creation of the superior Toy Story 2. There was also a lot of claptrap about how sequels cheapened a company’s vision, too. After being integrated into the larger Disney structure, there are still direct-to videos coming, and plenty of them aren’t terribly good. Before the merger of Pixar and Disney when the two companies were still co-operatively separate, Lassiter himself spoke about Disney’s stream of direct-to releases, sequels to some of the studio’s classics which were, in his view, hardly flattering to the legacy. Cars 2’s director, John Lassiter, one assumes from his previous statements, felt the same way at one point.
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The whole movie does as well, leaning on a feel of an episodic TV show versus a slam-bang theatrical “experience.” Call it the snobbish belief of what constitutes “worthiness” and the ingrained biases over what we feel direct-to-video features are and should be. Larry works best on the smaller screen, in controlled doses, and so does his four-wheeled alter ego. In number two, on the big screen, it is all too overwhelming and probably says a lot about why no single Larry movie vehicle has achieved much, in direct contrast to a continuing popularity. A little bit of Mater, voiced by Larry The Cable Guy, goes a long way which is why one assumes the character was relegated to comic relief status in the first film.
Mater is mistaken for a super-spy, yet another very haggard plot device that has been used by Peter Sellers, Leslie Nielsen, Rowan Atkinson and even Fred Flintstone, lo these many years. In Cars 2, McQueen and Mater head to Europe to race in the Grand Prix.
Having gone through all that exposition, I can say that Mater, the tow truck, comes nowhere near being interesting enough to anchor a theatrical film. With Paul Newman, the actor that voiced Doc, deceased there was no clean way of telling that story without courting perceived disrespect, and thankfully, Pixar never went in that direction. About the only other character in this realm that had the meat to be interesting while standing alone was that Doc, The Hudson Hornet. Cars ‘ Lightning McQueen is the star because he/it has to be to tell the story. Don’t forget: Toy Story 2 had been developed as a direct-to-home-video offering too but was deemed more worthy of theatrical status as production continued.īut the Toy Story world has something the Cars world doesn’t: a cast of characters that, for the most part, could anchor their own stories individually. Essentially, Cars was suited to be a made-for-DVD movie and probably would have been regarded more favorably had it actually been so. As most car races are viewed by most people on television, so too the story conventions seemed to fit into the home theater box nicely, where it seemed out-of-place on the big screen. Part of that was through the magic of viewing it on television. It was not as if Pixar was telling some drastically new kind of story, anthropomorphically imbued characters aside.īut even in its weaknesses, the original Cars had charm and has actually aged well. After all, the first film was a parable about becoming a selfless citizen from being an ego-driven loner, already a dusty chestnut in terms of plot. Viewed as a slipshod attempt on Pixar Animation’s part to turn the first film, long held as the weakest of their output prior to Cars 2, into a franchise with all the aggressive merchandising riding shotgun, one could make the argument that it is that most cynical of attempts to milk the tot-market. As these things go, Cars 2 is not awful provided you are judging the movie with a specific viewpoint.
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