Even with bumps, 'Cars' gets it in gear

BY GENE SEYMOUR | Newsday Staff Writer

June 9, 2006

The most persuasive endorsements for Pixar's digitally animated features don't come from critics or audiences, but from the studio's many competitors. Try as they might, not even the best products of Pixar's rivals can match the conceptual ingenuity, polished execution and crispy-fresh wit of "Toy Story," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters Inc.," "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles." Pixar has been on such a tear that even the most world-weary moviegoer gets all antsy waiting for the studio's next collaboration with Disney.

"Cars" has finally rolled into the multiplexes. It doesn't quite measure up to those aforementioned masterworks, either. But Pixar at less than its absolute best is still miles ahead of just about anyone else working in their corner of the movie universe. Even St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols hits pop flies once in a while.

And as pop flies go, "Cars" is pretty to watch, even as it loops, drifts and, at times, looks as if it's just hanging in midair. The backgrounds alone are worth the price of several children's tickets - and the popcorn, too! You can almost taste the dust and gravel churning beneath the rubber tires of "Cars'" main characters. Simple things such as night, day, water, mud and tar come across more vividly through Pixar's house wizardry than through just about anyone else's computer-generated effects.

The story that plays out in front of such grand designs seems almost a dead ringer to the 1991 fish-out-of-water comedy "Doc Hollywood," only with talking machinery. The fish, in this case, is a hot-dogging stock car named Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson), whose flamboyance proclaims both unlimited potential and deep-dish ego.

While traveling cross-country for a crucial race, McQueen becomes separated from his transport truck (Pixar perennial John Ratzenberger) and finds himself stranded in a desert backwater town that has itself been stranded by both time and the superhighway.

A cute, edgy Porsche (Bonnie Hunt) and a cantankerous Hudson sedan named Doc (Paul Newman) force McQueen to stay in town until he finishes repaving the town's main drag that he'd unwittingly scarred. McQueen, anxious to make his race, isn't pleased with things. But the town's arcane charms grow on him.

As in other Pixar stories, "Cars" uses playthings as means to decry the gratuitous, casually cruel way society handles obsolescence. Making cars, planes and other vehicles into anthropomorphic beings is a risky way to go about it, given that such a path can too often lead to terminal cutesiness.

Take Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), the relentlessly dimwitted tow truck, who despite his excessive gooberness may end up as the most widely beloved of the characters - though there's something to be said for the raspy conviction that Newman brings to his brooding vintage model.

Director John Lasseter is working with a script that boasts six writers, including himself and his late, much-lamented co-director, Joe Ranft. Such a situation is usually a sure sign of trouble - and a prime suspect in the movie's infrequent speed bumps.

Yet even when it threatens to get all goopy with sentiment, "Cars" carries out every twitch, twist and turn with sufficient assurance to make you wonder how hard it can be for other animation studios to achieve double-takes and pace their gags with as much care and panache.

OK, maybe one could get a little worried when "Cars" slips into some of the same shrill pandering as Pixar's competitors. But there aren't nearly enough such moments in this scruffy, ingratiating movie to require a call for the ambulances.