Cars 3

Car 3

Cars 2 picks up where the original left off with our hero, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) returning home to Radiator Springs after a lengthy racing season. The audience are introduced to old favourites from the town including McQueen’s best friend, Mater the rusty tow-truck (Larry the Cable Guy). A series of events lands McQueen into the Wold Grand Prix which takes him around the Automobile inspired planet, including England, Japan and Italy. However it is not all about racing this time around; the film also introduces us to British spy car, Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) who is on his own mission to track down a criminal mastermind…car. I liked the way Director John Lasseter introduces real world issues into the film. One of the main plotlines involves Eddie Izzard who voices Sir Miles Axelrod (a reference to Sir Richard Branson) who has invented a new fuel that doesn’t rely on oil to be produced. Our dependence on fossil fuels is a major issue in the real world today and by addressing it in a film especially a kid’s film I think it helps highlight the problem to a whole new generation. As much as I enjoyed Cars 2, I felt that it tried to tell too many stories at once (which seems to be the norm for most films these days). My issue was that it was completely different from the slower journey to self discovery storyline seen in the first Cars movie. I realise that this is a completely different film and Lasseter was going for something bigger and grander but I am a firm believer that in some cases less is more (The mentor in the first film was an old Hudson Hornet and in the new one its an Aston Martin DB5 with a collection of high-tech bells and whistles). I loved the simplicity of the coming age story in Cars and it still remains one of my top ten favourite films. Australian V8 Supercar driver Mark Winterbottom makes a cameo appearance as “Frosty” the race car. Now I’m not saying that Cars 2 isn’t a good movie, far from it. While it might not have the same gripping storyline of its predecessor, it makes up for it in the visuals department. The amount of detail that the folks at Disney and Pixar put into each location around the world is simply amazing. There are literally thousands of individual cars in some of the scenes and it is sometimes easy to forget that there isn’t really a world filled with sentient automobiles. I was satisfied with Cars 2 and I think it brought something new and exciting to the Disney franchise. Almost all of the characters from the first film make an appearance and the new ones are just as memorable. Even though it’s a kid’s movie, Cars 2 can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages. Lasseter should be commended for successfully creating a film that the inner child in all of us can identify with. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————— SPECIAL FEATURES ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————

 While Cars 2 only contains two main featurettes I enjoyed both of them and thought that they were a fitting finish to a great movie. Air Mater and Hawaiian Vacation are two short films released by Disney and Pixar that take the story of Cars and Toy Story a little bit further. Air Mater is short feature in which Mater gets fitted for his very on set of wings enabling him to fly. Hawaiian Vacation is a Toy Story short film where the toys give Barbie and Ken the ultimate Hawaiian vacation all from the confines of Sunnyside Day-care. Putting these shorts at the end of Disney films is a great idea and I only hope that they make a regular occurrence on future Disney releases. The only criticism I can give the special features is that there were not enough. I would have enjoyed some interviews with the cast or the creative team behind Cars 2.

Disney and Pixar took a gamble with Cars 2, presumably hoping to supercharge a franchise that didn’t quite catch on with audiences when the first film was released. Cars was an entertaining fish-out-of-water story with stunning computer animation and a worthwhile message.
Yet, it was overly Americanized (NASCAR racing doesn’t have the global appeal the script seems to imply) and too predictable to capture hearts in the way that the Toy Story films

 For the sequel Disney and Pixar have wisely attempted to avoid the first of those mistakes by making the story international and throwing in references to car races that are given far more value outside the US than those for which Lightning McQueen is supposedly world famous. They also took the ethos of the first film and essentially turned it on its head. In the result the message is more superficial (real friends are willing to become scrap metal to save each other), the story is even more boy-oriented than the first film’s and the innocence of backwater Radiator Springs is replaced with a global espionage adventure featuring guns, explosions, torture and Mater in a women’s toilet. Speaking of Mater, this is really his film. Lightning McQueen is the reason why the old rust bucket gets to globetrot as part of the World Grand Prix but it’s Mater that gets mistaken for an international spy and thereby falls into most of the dangerous stuff. The result is entertaining, action-packed and energetic nonsense. Parents sensitive about violence might wish to reserve it for when their smallest children get older (I didn’t and mine seemed to enjoy it), but everyone else should get a kick out of it even if it isn’t up to the standards set by Woody and Buzz. At at least the writers can’t be accused of dredging from the same river twice.