When it comes to Disney’s Pixar films, my family and I are suckers. There hasn’t been one of the animated films that we haven’t liked. We’ve seen every single one of them at the theaters and all four of my kids have grown up watching everything from Up!, Toy Story 1-3, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles (our family favorite), to Cars. They’ve all been great fun and artistic masterpieces.
We all waited – especially my 3 year-old Lightning McQueen fanatic – for the release a few weeks ago for Pixar’s big summer sequel, Cars 2.
The second in the series has our heroes Lightning McQueen and his blissfully unaware buddy Tow Mater baited into an international race by an Italian racer by the name of Francesco Berscolini. Once they travel to Tokyo for the first race in the international Grand Prix, Mater finds himself smack dab in the middle of a James Bond-like spy caper.
And that’s where Cars 2 goes horribly wrong.
Besides the fact the storyline seems a bit too convoluted and mature for younger children, the underlying political message also becomes so central to the story, parents who may have a different point of view, or perhaps simply don’t want political messages force-fed to their children, also get lost. At least that’s what happened for us.
In Cars 2, the villians are “big oil” and their attempt to foil the use of alternative fuels. Sure, there are lots of shallow story lines throughout Cars 2 but the central theme is a “green” one. And even if you’re a supporter of alternative fuel (who wouldn’t be with gas still at four bucks a gallon), the preachy lackluster plot left my kids feeling ho-hum. The spy plot was only a subtext to the anti-fossil fuel message and was simply a bore. Outside of a few minutes of race scenes, the cars don’t get to do what they do best – race. Not only that, the characters millions of kids have come to love are so sparingly used my son kept asking for them by name.
Larry Cable Guy, the voice of Mater, again carries the film. In fact, he really is the star of Cars 2. Owen Wilson, who voices Lightning McQueen, is barely a supporting character. Yet again, another odd choice by Pixar. It’s hard to tell who the star is at times and the introduction of all new characters strays from the Toy Story model of keeping – deepening – our relationship with characters from the previous film. A huge mistake in my book.
It’s always tough for sequels to live up to the original. Yet Pixar has done a good job of it in the past – especially with the Toy Story trilogy. Because of that, we expected much more of Cars 2 than it delivered.
The film, directed by the great John Lasseter, was so far off from the original, it’s hard to believe he had anything to do with the film. In fact, it played more like a direct-to-DVD release than a theatric release. The movie was such a mess, it’s really not worth the space to go in-depth here on the complete story. You can read other reviews for that.
By infusing a kids movie with such an overt political statement, my guess is Pixar and Disney will lose some of the trust they’ve built over the last 25 years. That, coupled with a poorly written and executed film, has this Pixar and Cars Dad feeling ripped off.
My guess is this release was little more than a reason to refresh the successful Cars toy line.
It certainly wasn’t to make a fun, enjoyable and endearing film.
And that’s too bad.
[...] back to some basics. Despite the success of its computer, 3D animated classics by Pixar (except the latest disaster that is Cars 2), Disney is getting back to creating calming and innocent films for kids in an increasingly busy [...]