Hacker Cinema
Cars
2006 · Film · 117 min
Part of Cars Collection
Directed by John Lasseter
AnimationAdventureComedyFamily
Lightning McQueen, a hotshot rookie race car driven to succeed, discovers that life is about the journey, not the finish line, when he finds himself unexpectedly detoured in the sleepy Route 66 town of Radiator Springs. On route across the country to the big Piston Cup Championship in California to compete against two seasoned pros, McQueen gets to know the town's offbeat characters.
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108 comments on Hacker News
Kids and convenience. 99% of the movies I’ve bought from iTunes are kids movies. Some of them were watched over and over and over.
DVDs and Blu-rays I purchased from the same era required a) advance planning and b) care. To the second point, most of the physical media is now destroyed (scratched, stepped on, lost, or just degraded), but I still have access to the copy of Cars I bought almost 20 years ago from Apple.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
A satirical take on "western city builders" is a game called Car Park Capital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFJEbv4qqo8
I find most US urban/suburban planning to be dystopian in nature. It is like the movie Cars: it is a fantasy world without people where essentially none of the infrastructure is changed because everything was already built for the car.
Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
I asked chatGPT what Mack used to bang on the trailer at the beginning of the original Cars movie to alert Lightning McQueen that the other racers were heading to the start line. It came up with some stuff about a crane arm to which I replied, that wasn't shown in any shot in any of the Cars movies. It then said it was wing mirrors to which I said they aren't long enough. After a bit of conversation ChatGPT apologised to me and said it didn't know.
I haven't tried with any other models but if someone else wants to try I'd be interested in the results.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
As an outsider looking-in that caught some of this portrays in Pixar/Disney's animated Cars [1] movies its interesting to reflect upon the parallels with its Route 66 references, which originate from and also culturally impacted us locally [2].
It's also ironic that Route 66 [3] was originally in-and-of itself a bypass.
As someone that predominantly lived in a capital urban city of a nation still expanding rather than contracting, understanding its equivalent occurence in Bulgaria is even more difficult.
[1] https://betweenenglandandiowa.com/2018/02/11/cars-route-66-movie-locations/
[2] https://route66.com.au/
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Route-66
I've seen this discussion a lot, but what about when they hire a sound-a-like voice actor for a cartoon after a popular movie?
Case in point, Owen Wilson was the voice of the main character in the Cars movie, but they got a different voice actor for some of the cartoons who sounded similar. Same thing for the ghostbuster cartoon after the movie was a big success in the 80s.
Why is that ok?
After Cars there’s: - Ratatouille - Up - Inside Out
In your opinion, which movie has a better story than any of those?
Pixar badly lost its edge by getting complacent.
Somewhere after cars, 3D animation competition started breaking past pixar’s moat that no one else could make a 3D movie look quite as good, and somewhere after Toy Story 3, it became clear that competition had broken past pixar’s moat that no one could tell equally compelling narrative stories. Since then, Disney’s in-house team, Dreamworks, and other major productions have soundly eaten their lunch.
Pixar needs to return to its bread and butter story-telling, trying to focus on being a toy-peddler has ruined them.
How many words are spoken onscreen? I was visiting while my friend’s kid learned to talk. The kid watched Toy Story’s Cars on repeat. I watched him day-by-day adding more and more complex turns of phrase directly copied from the film. Did that “Rob him” no it taught him to speak.
I would be careful about Hollywood loss numbers. Disney is in it for the merch. That said, I wonder how those movies stack up to older greats like Cars, Toy Story, or Monsters Inc. They are only true failures if they fail to sell toys. Which considering I’ve never seen merch for any of these movies on the street tells me they probably have failed.
They recently broke YouTube search even more. Go to a channel and do a search within that channel using the search field that is on the far right of the options below the channel information. You may have to click the ">" on the right to make it visible.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
Usually elicits positive responses when I say I contribute to hardware and software that helps you enjoy movies like Cars and Moana with your kids!!!
Now I'm going to have to rewatch it. I'm class of '99, in the crowd in that video, and my son watched the Cars movie countless times and I missed the cameo because he always watches the dubbed version (we're Dutch).
Cars is often hated because kids absolutely adored it, Disney is wringing as much profit out of that IP as possible, and I think the part of that movie that is for adults is not as upfront and center as it is for Pixar's previous work.
The obvious message of the movie "winning isn't everything" seems like childish moral pablum. But like many Pixar films of that era, the principal message is a more adult idea: that satisfaction in life is not attained by traditional metrics of success. Competition has its place but the rich experiences in life are not necessarily where the spotlight is. Maybe that too seems like a "well duh" lesson for kids but man there's a lot of adults who don't get that out there.
I wonder what I would have thought if I watched it at 4.
I saw Cars in the least favorable way possible, so my hatred for that movie should be entirely understandable, but it is still a fun story to tell: It was the height of "Wii Mania" and my brother desperately wanted a Wii. (We were both in college at the time, for age context.) Being a good older sibling I agreed to help line stand in the local Wal-Mart's crazy rule-filled queue to buy one as soon as the truck pulled up with fresh stock the next morning.
It's one of those worst kinds of "sleepover" situations where you are trapped inside a Wal-Mart with underpaid retail workers who obviously don't want to be there that late/early either so they give you a lot of rules and restrictions and marching orders in part as much to keep themselves entertained as to keep things "orderly". That's part of why we needed two of us to keep a single spot in line, because they were trying to exhaust people and hope they leave.
One of the other most exhausting things about it, and I still mostly think it was intentionally a torture decision, was that near the place where the line spent most of its hours over night there in that Wal-Mart was a TV with the volume on. That TV was left in an endless loop of the movie Cars. Every time it ended it went right back to the beginning of the movie.
(When the fresh members of Wal-Mart's morning shift finally arrived we eventually did convince one of them to change movies on that TV and turn the volume down, to cheers among us. I still believe it mostly proved it was always possible, the late shift just hated us.)
Cars will always be associated for me with late night exhaustion and torture. I feel for all the parents that got versions of that from well-meaning kids rather than spiteful retail employees retaliating at crazy customers.
My son loved Cars, so we ended up getting him Cars 2. When he (probably about 4 at the time) saw cars being tortured in Cars 2, he got so upset that he started screaming and punching the TV screen. We turned it off immediately because it was just too intense for him (found out later that he had autism). He didn't end up watching Cars 2 until he was about 10.
He still often watches the first and third movie, but rarely the second.
I think what Pixar was originally was a tech company with groundbreaking tech enabling them to make 3d movies in ways nobody else could.
But writers and directors aren't perfect. And it is important to note that there will be flops.
The main "problem" is that the tech is so commoditized now, that pretty much every studio has excellent 3d animation tech and basically can do everything Pixar can do. So now it comes down to artists, writers, and the director to make the substance, and basically Pixar is just another company now... no longer are they groundbreaking.
IMO this is fine. It just sneaks up on you, subtly, and then before you know it Pixar is just another company making animated movies of reasonably decent quality.
Edit: To be honest, I think all of Pixar's movies (except maybe Cars) were above average in terms of quality.
The a posteriori "I told you so" title, "Pixar was never a masterpiece factory", is a clickbait sham. Many Pixar sequels outdo most first-run offerings from their wannabe competitors. They have also made a great film or two this decade. I loved Bug's Life. In retrospect, it is easy to demonize the film as arguably its best performance was made by Kevin Spacey. Cars was challenging to get into, particularly given the considerable Heartland cultural nods. As my first born loved it, I saw it repeatedly and eventually I could clearly see its greatness that others could see first viewing. It did decidedly well at the box office. A much much better title of this article would be, "I don't understand why everyone else loved Pixar so much".
de Boer claims that the trailer for Brave belies the fact that it was stuck in development hell, so much that includes content not in the movie --- but everything in that trailer is in the movie, so much so that the "mountain" Merida is seen climbing was critiqued for being Yosemite geology rather than Scottish.
I'm baffled by the claim that Ratatouille is intentionally hard to love. I think it's a telling statement. de Boer's schtick is, of course, contrarianism for its own sake (it's why so much of his writing ends up here, despite the fact that his writing beat almost never overlaps HN). It's as if he assumes that anything he likes must be an outsider pick. In the world I inhabit, Ratatouille is universally beloved, with a higher gross box office than the allegedly crowd-pleasing Cars movies or any of the Toy Story films.
The whole paragraph really comes across as a parody of the Rick and Morty copypasta, but I don't think that was deliberate.
In the same way the author says that people would hate Up without the first ten minutes, I think a lot more people would enjoy Cars if the first ten minutes were removed. The opening is really heavy on the advertising and low on the story beats and themes compared to the rest of the movie.
> Didn’t cars end up making the most money despite the poor ratings?
That's because the critics view of what a 4 year old wants to see doesn't actually matter.
My son put me through hell at that time with almost daily viewings of cars, a merchandised Disney Cars bed, stacks of toys, clothing, hats, etc.
Cars is one helluva good movie if you're in the correct age range. Hell, the first time I watched it I loved it :-)
> I don't understand what went wrong with Cars 2
Cars 1 was a cute fish out of water movie where a self-centered braggart is humbled and finds true friendship and how to be a better person. Cars 2 is a kids movie full of gunplay and violence that opens with a torture scene, progresses towards murder, and finishes with the protagonists escape a death trap to prevent mass murder for profit. I mean, I don't know what anyone was thinking with this one.
I loved Cars 1 (theme: It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice) and Cars 3 (a time comes when you need to step aside, make peace with it, use it). I don't understand what went wrong with Cars 2 (theme: Idk, some short story expanded by chatGPT ;) to a long story) but I find it a very bad movie, really unwatchable almost.
My then 4 year old son forced me to watch Cars 50 times and I still think it’s a good movie.
All I’m saying is, critics gonna critique but theres plenty people who absolutely adore Cars. I mean it has 100% refridgerated air!
I think there’s a bit to this and also a bit where he gets it wrong. What’s right:
1. A Bug’s life was underwhelming after Toy Story. I grew to like it more after having entered the workforce.
2. Luca is understated.
3. Kids love Cars way more than adults.
4. Coco is a real diamond in a whole lot of (relative) rough.
5. The second half of Wall-E is quite good.
6. People aren’t unkind enough regarding Toy Story 4. Not amount of unkindness will be enough enough.
There’s lots more wrong but I want to zero in on one thing, Up.
De Boer says that without the first 10 minutes the movie is awful… but that’s the point of the movie. It’s about a miserable grieving man… the scene sets up the rest of the movie. Of course the movie sucks without it. It tells the story on the basis that you have just watched that scene.
Cars wasn't a critical darling but has absolutely dominated Pixar revenues for years based on merchandizing.
It's really hard to get accurate (or recent) data about these things but at one point was 4x Toy Story merchandizing revenue.
https://www.therichest.com/most-popular/10-movies-that-sold-the-most-merchandise/
Sure, they have not been a masterpiece factory for almost two decades now. However they were certainly a masterpiece factory at one point, that point being the first decade of the studio's life.
During that time they were certainly a masterpiece factory. From 1995 with their first film Toy Story, to 2004 with the release of The Incredibles, that resulted in consistently great films for 9 years. Their record held for 11 years until Cars was released in 2006.
I believe no other studio has had similar performance. I remember around early 2000's news of Hollywood studios in panic because investors started asking other studios why it was considered business as usual, a given, that for every successful film a studio released there would be flops too. So like VC investing, the pay off for the eventual success had to be enough to offset those films that flopped and lost money.
But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
This article sort of paints a picture of how outstanding their success was at the time: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/12/3
So I guess I disagree with the title, Pixar was most certainly a masterpiece factory in its first decade.
Reading deBoer's article I can't say I agree or disagree about the recent state of Pixar, I grew up with Pixar films and their first decade coincided with my childhood and early teenage years, so when I think to myself "yeah Pixar's recent work doesn't touch that early magic" I can't really tell is that my bias coming through?
Maybe I am overthinking this a bit.
I was surprised to see Cars listed as one of the ones that people generally hate. I’m a little biased because my son absolutely adored that movie, and I have fond memories of him taking his Lightning McQueen toy around with him everywhere. But over many repeated watchings both my wife and I agreed it was a quality production.
It has a good cast with Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, and even Larry the Cable Guy puts in a pretty decent performance. The minor characters are charming, too (including George Carlin and Cheech Marin).
The story is fairly timeless and reminiscent of Doc Hollywood. I don’t know how they manage to make it work so well with anthropomorphic cars, but somehow they do. The main character has a good arc, and there’s a good amount of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever cried, but I definitely felt something - which is more than I can say for the Cars sequels.
Would I go and watch it now without kids? No. But Pixar put out a movie that entertained kids and adults alike. Earned $462 million at the box office. Made an absolute killing in merchandise sales (and I thought the toys were pretty high quality, especially the die cast Tomica cars here in Japan). I have a lot of respect for what they were able to do with Cars. Not so much for the sequels, though.
They also call Monsters University a mediocre sequel, but I tend to prefer it over Monsters Inc. Pretty much for the same reasons as Cars - good cast, timeless story reminiscent of Revenge of the Nerds, and my kids loved it.
Pixar movies used to have a very high standard for film critics. Rotten Tomatoes has Lightyear ranked as the 3rd worst Pixar movie behind Cars (https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/all-pixar-movies-ranked/)
Our kid is just three and there's an issue with screens. Even a half hour a day of Khan Academy (currently set to 1st Grade) creates lots of whining at other times in the day for more. A preoccupation with Cars movie characters is OK with toy cars (I guess) but not when there's early morning pleading to watch it again.
But otherwise we're on the same route as you. ATM the kid is heavily into doing jigsaw puzzles on his own (60 pc is about his limit for DIY), and he likes to read to himself now and then.
they look like an angry face to make others turn away. i'd love it if cars had friendly faces as if they are from the "cars" movie, but i'd be afraid of others trying to approach them for a hug or a kiss
How long until what is currently photography is either full length video or 3d navigable worlds?
These Star Wars galleries are just phenomenal. I can't imagine it is long until you can apply filters to movies, for example taking Rogue One and applying a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick filter.
Or akin to Cars being a remake of Doc Hollywood with anthropomorphized Cars, being able to say something like "I want to see a remake of the 2013 movie Rush, in the world of Zootopia, with 15% styling from Speed Racker, set in the 70's, with flying animals, and the main two rival protagonists being flying squirrels, one of which has a birth defect and a prosthetic wing."
https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_permalinks=457335126558057
https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_permalinks=456534189971484
Next focus on quality instead of quantity. Less She-Hulk and more Loki. Maybe every single Star Wars character doesn’t need a six or ten episode backstory. Maybe Cars doesn’t need four sequels. The Lone Ranger has kept his mask on since 1933, the Mandalorian couldn’t do it five episodes.
My kids have the Cars movie version of the Mille bornes. In my mind, the Cars design ruins the whole game, it's no longer special to me. Plus it's really hard to tell the card types without looking carefully at the small logos in the corners. All the cards have cars on it! It just feel like any random cheap Disney board game.
I'm feeling old. :D
I am now wondering if another character from a Pixar movie was a reference to a real world character. My kid loves "Cars". And Stanley is a travelling radiator cap salesman.
I checked out a few other characters in the Cars movie and it is surprising how many are references to historical figures.
'Stranger Things', 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels', 'The Usual Suspects', 'Pulp Fiction'... all immediately come to mind as man-in-hole stories.
Reductive/deconstructive literary criticism helps highlight novel elements of the subject story. I can't fathom being upset about it, but then again, I didn't watch 'Cars'. Maybe it is a particularly bad movie?
Man in Hole. The main character gets into trouble but winds up being better from the experience.
This is kind of like the plot of Cars where Lightening has to fix the road of a small town he wrecks. Car in Hole. I personally think I'm better from the experience because I'll be avoiding watching those movies with my kids in the future...
Wow
I think that this api also needs some HATEOS-style self-reference url so that when I click on random I know how to get back to that
Also there needs to be a way to get the next wow in a movie. How do I go from the 3rd Wow in Cars to the 4th?
Yikes, for some reason I didn't compute at first that your first few sentences were a form of levity. I was getting ready to respond as if you were that out of touch. haha
As a fairly disgruntled Californian myself, there are fellow Californians I know who aren't that far off from the attitude you described sarcastically. I feel kind of bad because I think they know deep down that reality is gradually no longer reflecting their viewpoint, and they can't admit it. I have a very good long time friend, for instance, whose politics have been pretty much entirely implemented by the state over our lifetimes. He's very much a self-described "progressive", and that puts it lightly (he also considers himself a communist, but he's more bashful about that). He, being a once openly political guy, no longer opens his mouth about these issues because he can't deny that other states and entire other countries with smaller economies are surpassing us in those regards.
Take energy, for instance. California's leaders have stated explicitly many times over the years that we are "leading the nation" and "setting an example for the world" with our policies towards infrastructure, yet what do we have to show for it? Blackouts? Massive wildfires caused by the electrical grid? The closing of nuclear plants? Give me a break.
Then there's the social issues and homelessness. Maybe it's a case of the frog being boiled slowly, because to me I've clearly seen a massive decline in our cities over my lifetime. I'm ashamed to show visitors around LA and refuse to do so at this point because the homeless encampments are so widespread. I'm absolutely for helping the homeless, but we also have this effect where the homelessness has permeated everything.
And yeah, to be stereotypical, our roads are crap, despite how frequently parts of them are closed off for maintenance. Every time I drive in another state, I'm stunned at how nicely paved the highways are. In much of SoCal, you can expect lots of pits, cracks, and seams to cause a bumpy ride. There's even a part of the 210 freeway that, I kid you not, reminds me of that scene from the Pixar movie "Cars" where Lightning has to pour new asphalt on the main road and it comes out all patchy and awful.
Yet there are still people in complete denial or in delusion. The rest of the world has moved on, and because California is too-big-to-fail with its abundance of resources, it's effectively in the "cash cow" phase that most corporations experience where nothing needs to change because the hogs can keep feeding from the trough. Basically, California is the IBM of states; we're old and slow and boring, but everyone's still relying on our mainframes.
Texas is the epitome of this. We ride our bikes to the store and people look at us like we're some sort of aliens visiting from mars. We take a 4 mile bicycle ride and my family can hardly understand it. "But you have a car?! Why?"
Just going for a stroll here requires noise cancelling headphones. The cars are so noisy you can barely talk to each other. Modified exhausts, suspiciously clean off road tires, backfiring fuel rich ricers, and broken mufflers are super common so all you hear is farting brrrrrrts, random explosions, or whining whahhhhhhs.
In the meantime, half my friends can barely afford transportation. There are practically no busses, trains, or even trails between the cities. Only roads for cars. Sometimes I think Pixar was making a hidden jab when they made the movie Cars. A country where vehicles are the citizens and people are invisible.
It's also short for Tow Mater in the CARS movies, so, keep that in mind.
At a lunch meeting after seeing Cars I came up with the idea that there should be two more Cars movies. Still Pixar hasn't sent me any royalties for my idea.
An interesting caveat is that ray tracing has a high up-front cost, but rendering time is less sensitive to scene complexity than traditional polygon rasterization. Beyond a certain level of scene complexity, ray tracing can be faster, it's just that games are generally limited by what can fit in memory of a modern graphics card.
Regarding Pixar, they actually avoided ray tracing until they decided they really did need accurate reflections for the movie Cars. The reason is that traditional rendering is memory parallel: you can render a scene that won't fit in memory on a single computer by spreading the scene across a cluster. With ray tracing, the memory access patterns aren't predictable, so you have to have the whole scene fit in memory on every compute node. This doesn't matter for games because games don't divide the graphics computation across multiple machines.
Counterpoint:
In my household we have about 6 or 7 axle failures. One King, a Cruz, a Sally, a McQueen, and I think something I'm forgetting.
Otherwise on the whole the metal Cars series has been excellent over here. Through the Mack race track thing (since re-sold) and a couple other bang arounds, these look pretty good to me. From floor to sandbox to hosing down, I'm surprised how well these have held up.
Generation 1 was plastic. I get that. Gen 2 - 3 has been pretty decent manufacturing. This Gen 4 has a lot of plastic but the color-change hot/cold water trick is nice for bath time.
Please pardon the pontification, but I'm sorry you haven't enjoyed the Cars universe as much as some others. Also the level of destruction you describe is, uh, probably a different thread. You'd be surprised the resale value on those "thousands" to people who kinda sorta have fun collecting them all.
All I can say is: thank goodness I can stream Herbie movies on Disney+
My sense is that the quality of these Cars cars has gone down over time. Our nephews, who got them when the movies came out, have really nice ones that have lasted 10+ years.
The ones we got when our son was watching (2-3 years ago) are decent but still flimsy.
The ones we’ve gotten recently are total trash. Almost 100% plastic. Super light. Awful.
For about two years, our oldest son was obsessed with the Cars movie. Over that period, friends and family have overwhelmed our house with die-cast Cars toys, of which there are thousands. We have hundreds. We have many that have no speaking part, and we have some that are not onscreen for more than a few frames. We have over 25 Lightning McQueens.
These Cars cars are junk. They break so easily. The axles are thin, flimsy pieces of metal, the paint jobs are terrible, and they drive smoothly for two weeks before they start stuttering and sliding.
For comparison, we have a few hand-me-down Hot Wheels (edit: Matchbox, not HW) cars made in England in the 70s that have been abused on-and-off for 20 years, and they still roll like they were just made. Newer ones aren't as sturdy or as heavy as those 50-year-old ones, but they're still much more nicely built than the Cars ones.
All I can say is: thank goodness the Cars phase is over.
How much time and money do people spend on collecting music/movies?
How many times can a person watch Cars?
This just seems crazy.
The main thing I learned from (a link in) this article is that Bin Laden had Charlie Bit My Finger in his personal collection?!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41840864
> The al-Qaeda leader had a series of animated films on his hard drive including Antz, Cars, Chicken Little and The Three Musketeers. There were also several YouTube videos, including a viral clip from the UK called "Charlie bit my finger" and videos about crocheting, including one entitled "How to crochet a flower". The role-playing computer game Final Fantasy VII was also on the computer.
FF VII is actually a really good choice if you’re stuck inside for months or years on end. I’m baffled as to how OBL came to understand that, though.
This vehicle would be so much more adorable if they'd given it a more face-like front end, like an NA Miata, or anything more fitting to the Cars movie franchise.
> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated."
me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).
Toy Story has been on a very slid downhill after the second episode. 3 and 4 were both unnecessary and not very good. The same can be said for the Cars sequels, and the more recent Pixar productions in general - they had much better ideas in the very first years.
I've not had any interest in it, so I haven't really say through it.
The weird thing is that Cars has this emotional center around facades and regret and abandonment and the differences between the journey and the destination and it's this beautiful look into a town that got bypassed. And more to the point it has this emotional weight that was still really accessible to a young me that a lot of other kids studios didn't really trust kids with (except for like Miyazaki films and stuff).
And then Cars 2 was a mistaken-identity spy movie a la Johnny English or Get Smart. I don't doubt it was an entertaining movie or something, but it felt so outside the Pixar brand, like something Disney or Dreamworks or any other studio would make.
It was also the first sequel outside of the Toy Story series, from a studio that somewhat famously refused to do sequels if the world didn't have more story to tell.
Like I said, it was just such a weird departure to do seemingly do a sequel just because the world was popular enough.
Interesting; I feel it depends on the movie - they have a large portfolio now so some sort of averaging is inevitable.
I feel e.g. Cars franchise has limited vision. They're "allright", but not spectacular. I'm OK never seeing any of them again, even the first one.
On the other hand, I find Monsters Inc. a unique movie with a unique premise, and I can rewatch it regularly - with or without the kids 0:-). I also don't find it particularly sad. Inside out does indeed have a large dose of melancholy, but again I feel is a unique idea taken quite far without dilution.
(there are absolutely movies that are way more avant garde or quirky or surreal or even "creative" inasmuch as that can be objectively compared - but Pixar has two distinct audiences to cater to and they HAVE to be entertaining and attention-occupying to children; while inserting content that also keeps adults interested and even thoughtful - that's a specific set of constraints that e.g. "Love Death + Robots" does not have)
And if we look at their entire portfolio, the Pixar Shorts again have some absolutely brilliant, touching, "single idea executed to perfection" entries.
I may have to rewatch it, but I recall that movie being fairly entertaining, even as an adult.
I also will say I went to watch it without having seen the original Cars, so perhaps I really had no expectations for the film (other than it was a Pixar film)?
If reading the tea leaves about urban planning is the game, then it's also cherry picking.
How come kids are totally disinterested in cars? Oh wait, they're not disinterested in cars. There's a popular series of movies called Cars, and kids' toys include endless variations of cars like remote controlled cars and collections of miniature cars. When playing, kids will happily make vroom vroom noises and simulate car jumps and stunts and crashes, but I have never seen children's play involving the scenario of walking to a restaurant instead of driving there.
Wow, do I disagree with you.
I have repeatedly had Uber and Lyft pick a driver, I wait tens of minutes, and then the ride is cancelled. If Waymo can avoid that, then I would gladly pay MORE for it. (I waited at a hospital for 2 hours, at 2 am, one time.)
I've also had an Uber driver who had no idea how to drive. My wife had an Uber driver who was convinced the destination was a hundred yards into one of the Great Lakes, and couldn't be convinced to change their mind.
I think you're also underestimating the value of long-haul rides. If I can get a "moving hotel" that drives me over night to an awesome destination, I think that would be awesome. I mean, ideally it's a train. But that takes tons of infrastructure we don't have. If I could pay airline rates, and not have to go through airport security, not have delayed or cancelled flights, and could travel while sleeping? That would be phenomenal. Especially right now, avoiding airports and crowded planes? And post-covid, I think it could really help tourism.
I think you're also under-valuing having a self-driving car from the novelty aspect. Picture you're at a Disneyworld Resort, and you order Lighting McQueen to take you to the Magic Kingdom. He pulls up, it looks like him, sounds like him. You hop in, and you see his face on a display, continuing to talk to you.
Heck, picture the whole car is designed like a movie theater. Nice and dark, great sound.
Also, picture a self-driving car with a liquor license. That's like limo service, at Uber price, right? Hard to do that with an actual human driver, without a limousine license, right?
And we've all seen research that says that once you get enough self-driving cars, traffic jams go away. That alone is worth the cost, and then some.
Maybe. It’s not really comparable to such a specific studio like Pixar though. There’s plenty of talk before that talent likes Netflix. And not just because of the money being given out either. The culture of financiers is going to matter in some capacity. No other company is doing or has done what Netflix is doing either. Netflix is spending the most alongside Disney. But Netflix was already branching off with their original content years ago when their budget was at least not as enormous as it is now. Like all their foreign language originals.
Pixar is amazing. But it isn’t without warts either. The Cars franchise and releasing two movies in one year with The Good Dinosaur bombing as a result.
This is completely nonsensical.
Toy Story? Cars? Inside Out? Up? Coco?
None of these follow that template. Sure, some like a Bugs Life and Rattatouille follow this, but in quirky ways. All conventional narrative structure involves an external incident. That sets up the central conflict of the narrative.
Disney movies like Big Hero 6, Moana or Frozen are more likely to follow it, though again, there’s a lot more craft in the story and surrounding context than the base structure suggests.
This doesn't look like an alien or a robot as some cars do. It looks like a zero texture 1980s VW golf/rabbit with a dorky grill. Like something out of the Cars movie or a video game with no budget for licenses.
To past generations of Americans, cars represented freedom. Cars transcended race, bringing together car-lovers of all kinds in various ways. (Go to a car show and see.) This can even be seen in the movie 'Cars', one of my favorite movies.
But I think those days are passing. Today's teens don't have the same interest, at least not in huge numbers. I hope something similar takes the place cars have had in American culture.
Well, it reviews worse than a lot of Pixar movies. Although the idea that all Pixar movies review well is a bit of a selective memory thing too. I observe there's basically two tiers of Pixar movies, the ones that get 9+ out of 10, and the ones that come in at 7 or below. There's not a lot of "OK" Pixar movies, though Incredibles 2 happens to be one of them.
Also, somewhat ironically, I disagree that Cars (Metacritic: 73) is one of Pixar's worst, on the grounds that there are quite a few worse movies from Pixar, not least of which are the two sequels Cars 2 (Metacritic: 57) and Cars 3 (Metacritic: 59) and the spinoff Planes (Metacritic: 39 (!)). Cars is slow, and dripping with nostalgia callouts for people who are now in their 70s or 80s (I asked my father, currently mid-60s, and he said it was even older than anything he was nostalgic for), but it's at least watchable once.
This is why every kid I know has only one Pixar film they rave about and that's Cars, objectively one of their worst films. Pixar films used to appeal to everyone now they just seem to try to appeal to people who grew up with Pixar and are now adults.
I'm not talking about the gender politics angle, I'm more just talking about they have moved from telling stories about a simple whimsical idea that captures all imaginations which follows through to emotion to maybe trying to be too clever and maybe poignant with their ideas, it's almost like they're writing to the target of an adult Pixar fan that needs validation for their interests rather than everyone.
Just feel like they've lost the joy along the way, putting a Pixar film feels like I'm going to be in for a emotional slog now rather than something enjoyable, can't imagine any child getting excited about watching Inside Out or Up (I understand this is a fan favorite for good reason, but is it any child's favorite?)
To be clear, I would not entirely blame Apple. Apple is a digital company who will not care a lot about borders and region when selling hardware and software. But in order to sell movies and music that they do not "own", they have to enter into signed legal agreements with the rights-holders of that media. e.g. "Cars" is owned by Disney/Pixar.
Those agreements will mandate that Apple enforce this antiquated fuckwitery.
Disney has its own manufacturing facility for custom steel fabrication components
They need a diverse range of aesthetic designs that are structurally sound. Some structures in Disney are very unique, the first one that comes to mind is the Epcot ball. I can also see this material application being used in their animatronics possibly(jurassic world trex comes to mind). Other use cases might be nonload bearing walls and fences, there are a lot of walls in disney
It might also be needed for realistic physics rendering for pixar as well but I might be wrong though. First thing that comes to mind is the movie Cars and crash simulations on materials with this wall type.
They might have use cases for building souvenirs with these type of items. Disney imports a lot of stuff overseas and has a large number of facilities for JIT staging and manufacturing for custom things like specialty stamped glassware souvenirs coffee mugs etc. Those are done locally, at least thats what Universal Studios does
I might be wrong here too but they might want intentional deformation for reasons i do not know about. It could be for visual safety reasoms as well, you place this material adjacent to something load bearing. Similarly how civil engineers will put an elastic material on a broken wall to observe crack deformation. Youngs modulus on a sheet of metal of similar gauge thickness is going to be always higher than what these materials offer. Money is not an issue with disney at all.
Im not entirely sure if they intend to make 3D structures with this, or use laser sintering to build custom composite alloys with these materials. They are using finite element analysis with a combination of statistics to make these models.
There might be actual cost saving reasons behind these materials. Or it might be faster manufacturing and prototyping for small animatronics, they need lots of those in short time frames. Those materials are most likely laser sintered which is kind of like 3D printing which is used often in mechanical shops for prototypes. 3D printing plastic offers no elasticity deformation generally
Other things that come to mind with these materials. Cutting board mats, bracelets, mats, polygons, shape memory alloys (heat it up to change its shape), balls, necklaces, board games, yoyos, string games, anything you can 3D print, clothing, cosplay (e.g. lots of disney starwars stormtroopers), build you own mini deathstar kits (usually prelasered sheets of metal you fold), gundam model kits or similar, legos. Those are just some applications for souvenirs disney might use with it
Yes, the movie Cars is in the database :)
Wikipedia[1] says otherwise:
> [Cars was] Pixar's final independently-produced motion picture before its purchase by Disney in May 2006
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cars_(film)
Cars was a Pixar movie.
I miss the old Pixar. Yes, now Disney is making better animated films, but I'm not sure it's worth the loss of truly great Pixar films. Plus, it seems that Disney is slipping too. Though they released some good films after the acquisition of Pixar (Tangled was excellent), their recent releases have been... mediocre. I never liked Cars, Finding Dory could've been better... I suppose Moana was pretty good, but the exception to the new rule. Now to see good, emotionally resonant films, we look to other studios. Kubo was astounding good, for example. Props to Lassiter for his success, but it comes at the cost of great films for the whole family.
I'm 54 and Cars is one of my favorite Pixar films (no, I'm not a NASCAR kind of guy). I never understood why it received such poor ratings.
> I see Cars as a film that appeals to children primarily, while the others are "family" movies in the best sense.
They're not family movies, they're movies that parents want their kids to be interested in but the reality is kids prefer Cars, Frozen, Shrek and Minions.
I'm surprised that Cars holds ~75% on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatos, while Inside Out and Toy Story and others have >95%.
I see Cars as a film that appeals to children primarily, while the others are "family" movies in the best sense.
It always seemed to me that Cars was intended to be a more child-oriented movie, but I don't know that it should suffer for that critically.
Maybe it w as hoped to be a film on the same level as those others, but I can't imagine anybody read the script and thought it would be.
I was never a big fan of Cars, but I find it watchable. My young daughter loves it. Cars is one of those movies that really appeals to kids, and I didn't really understand that until I had a kid.
Cars is not a bad movie, it did very well, it was just a little below normal Pixar quality but still above most other studios work.
The good dinosaur, Brave and Monsters university all still good but not quite Pixar.
Cars two is an absolute disaster though and it's a shame it wasn't covered in the book. Something clearly went very wrong with this movie and they redid most of it in ten weeks or so I read, it seems to go against all the values and things they talk about and it does feel as if the story they tell about themselves is perhaps worked as much as the stories they make.
Cars (first one) was good, agree that Cars 2 was complete rubbish. I love animated movies, always have - but I could not get through Cars 2.
I actually liked the way the x-32 looked. If Disney made a movie like 'Cars' but called 'Jet Fighters', I always thought the X-32 would be a candidate for the protagonist.
What about Toy Story, Incredibles, Cars, Up... Oh wait they completely invalidate your point, I get why you left them out.
Or are you saying the sexism bias came in after the acquisition? So it's a Disney thing? Ignoring the fact that they are a company based around a massive Princess franchise, you are wondering why they like to manufacture princesses?
Did you forget the two male leads in Frozen? (Kristof and Olaf).
Do you point out the sexism in almost every facet of life to your kids? Or does this dilemma just hit you at disney movies? If your children are daughters, do you explain to them they should expect less from the world, because historic statistics show they are going to get less? Or if they are sons, do you explain how they will get more simply by being male?
Yeah, it's weird. My sons (2 and 4) absolutely love the first Cars movie, but they won't be watching the second until they are a bit older. It's quite a step up in menace and violence, sadly.
Pixar kind of had a chip on their shoulder during that era, they seemed especially mad at Hollywood and the critics. There's a dig at the end of Ratatouille pointed at Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over Cars:
https://reddit.com/r/movies/comments/35ezkp/til_after_cars_lost_out_on_the_oscar_for_best/
That really spends on the movie. I don't feel like Ratatouille is really a kids movie nor is The Incredibles. I'd even argue Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are pretty adult. I could certainly relate to Woody's feeling scared of the shiny new hire (TS1) or his being lured to probably the wrong job (TS2). Up seems like an adult movie with stuff added for kids vs the opposite. So did Wall.E IMO. Lots of parents found Saving Nemo very close to their hearts (not a parent so not one of my favs).
Cars, on the other hand ......
First, I appreciate the thoughtful discussion. Good points, and it's nice to have avoided Godwin's law in a thread this deep.
> Skype
I fundamentally agree with you. Skype does support way more platforms than just about any service I can think of, especially when you consider Skype for Web beta (http://blogs.skype.com/2014/11/14/please-welcome-skype-for-web-beta/). But I agree that nobody can support every platform.
> Chrome
Kind of true, but not all platforms can or will support arbitrary browsers. Worse, as a user I should never have to run multiple browsers just to use a web app. Extra chagrin here because holy cow this is the web we're talking about, and Google's established a pretty clear pattern over the past year of Chrome-only dev that should be pretty worrying to anyone that cares about web standards.
>shadenfreude
In my case, I decided that I was irritated enough at Google's actions that I'd rather not have Google apps on my phone apps than support their ecosystem. Plus, I genuinely prefer Windows Phone as a platform.
>OOXML
That was 2006, the same year jQuery was first released. Cars and Da Vinci Code were big movies that year. That was before Windows Vista shipped. It was a long time ago. If that's your reference on Microsoft's standards support, it's not the full picture.
>Blame all of them or none of them
I'll blame them all then, but I definitely feel like Microsoft's by far the least bad in this area. I'm disappointed, when I first got excited about the Android platform, I had high hopes that it would be something else. I ran early releases in VM's before phones were available. I was excited about an open source phone platform, and Google's general trend (at that time) of doing cool stuff on open source, open services, open API's. Things turned out differently.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
Aww- my 5 year old twin boys had picked up their "Don't drive like my brother" from listening to their show and the Cars movie- and use it often. So sad they won't get to enjoy them. RIP Tom
Since there is an aisle of Minecraft related merchandise in my local Target, I think the future cash will come from that. The Cars franchise has been worth billions in merchandise for Pixar/Disney. Regarding CARS "In the five years since its 2006 release, "Cars" has generated global retail sales approaching $10 billion, according to Disney. That ranks the Pixar film alongside such cinematic merchandising standouts as "Star Wars," "Spider-Man" and "Harry Potter," as well as its own paean to playthings, "Toy Story," according to researcher NPD." http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/21/business/la-fi-ct-cars2-20110621
In my house of kids (10,7,4,1) Minecraft is more popular than Lego, and it is a point of interest shared by many kids. I have been instructed several times that a Minecraft related gift would be good for a kids birthday party. Since the kids provide the design, entertainment, etc like Lego, I think this has a long long way to go.
My kids are still playing on the Xbox, and have not learned about mods or anything else yet. I am sure it will come soon.
You are absolutely right. People should stop upvoting my post because I'm totally wrong. Not only was Cars the first movie that was done using ray tracing, they thought it was glitchy and MU which was released 6 years later was actually the first movie to be fully raytraced.
That said, the technique they did use was scanline rendering, which is still rather different from z-buffering, which is the way GPU's generally render.
Of course now I'll change my argument that Pixar is after a non-realistic cartoony feel, so that gives them more freedom.
If you look at live action movies, the CG parts in there are either painted or ray traced, they need absolute control to be able to blend them.
> If raytraced scenes were hard to control, why would every single animated movie be raytraced?
That's a bit of a stretch. Pixar didn't use ray-tracing until Cars [2006]. Even then, it was only applied for secondary effects.
It wasn't until Monsters University [2013] that they produced the majority of a movie using ray-tracing [1]. That's a recent development, IMHO.
[1] http://thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com/2013/05/pixars-chris-horne-sheds-new-light-on.html
My uncle was an early adopter of these sorts of things for his rice farm. When I saw the movie "Cars" for the first time and the film portrayed Tractors as "dumb" I thought to myself, if you really knew what went into a modern tractor you would not portray it as "dumb" in an animated movie.
Having studied literature, I was taken aback by this, as it really is a nice story, that fit the facts after the fact. It is the classical "post hoc, ergo proter hoc", that is so common in (at least German) literature science.
Some small factoids are taken from "texts" (or here movies) and over them a nice story is fabricated, to "explain" these factoids.
For example the timeline. Does Cars for example mention the time anywhere in the movie? Or is this just a fictional fitting from the maker of this site?
Or does Monster Inc. somewhere mention a time, that would explain the position on the timeline?
Or the mentioned wars between animals/humans and machines/humans. Where in the movies are they referenced?
This (The Pixar Theory) is not a "scientific" theory. It does not in the least adhere to anything remotely resembling a scientific method.
Fun to see, non the less, but not explaining anything.
And here I thought the wackiest theory about Pixar films was the suggestion that Cars is actually the sequel to Terminator taking place 1,000 years after Skynet won.
Reminds me of the movie "Cars" by Pixar.
Agree. Cars was fantastic. I have watched it a hundred times with my kids. Cars 2 with the guns, torturing of cars, was to me a horrible movie. Saw it once in the theater, and I have no interest in buying the movie or watching it again.
Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.
________
[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I'm not a Star Wars person. It was a fine film when I saw it thirty years ago and I haven't thought of it since. My kids came to me after lots of other kids at their school had been talking about the mythology. They asked to see this movie just as they asked to see "Cars." I'm very interested in them having their own childhood, and they are doing just that.
How is a + sign so much smarter than a " mark?
quotation marks mean that you are making an exact quote, so you want an exact match.
Consider:
1. Hey, do you know anything about cars? Yeah, I have a fine automobile.
2. Hey, do you know anything about "Cars"? Yeah, it was a cute movie.
Cars and Cars 2 suffer from some of the same problems that Shrek 2 & 3 suffered from: creating a self-consistent universe based on adult puns based on characters of modern society.Unless it is done with restraint and real skill it soon behinds to feel insincere and contrived (see Sharks Tail, Chicken Run).
Toy Story & Shrek did something far cleverer. Shrek especially is smart, sophisticated humour for smart, sophisticated kids. The references are all from children's literature and culture. Kids know the references and are able to understand the clever puns.
Shreks 2&3 are dumb adult humour forced into the Shrek world. Many of the puns are above children's heads and are not sophisticated enough for the adult audience. Adding plot-lines about lawyers, unions etc just confuse small kids and leave adults slightly cringing.
Pixar and Dreamworks are at their best when they choose their target audience and focus on it. Toy Story & Nemo are for smart young kids; Ratatouille & The Incredibles are for smart older kids. Then enough is added for the rest of the family: everyone gets a clever joke every few minutes; the stories are understandable by all. Wall-E and Up are very adult in the big story (but full of great fun in the small story) I thought they were wonderful but I do understand your point (although they are I no way 'awful'—even if you are 5).
I'm not convinced that Pixar have mad a bad film yet. Cars grows on me the more I see it (and believe me if you have kids you end up seeing these films any times). Nemo (by far the funniest film Pixar have made) still makes me laugh despite having seen it 20+ times.
{I'm told that Cars 2 is relentless: too fast and too complicated for young kids, but as I haven't seen it I can't judge. The fact that I haven't seen it says something: I normally see every Pixar film the week it comes out.}
The problem that Pixar has had is that we have had to judge Pixar by Pixar standards as until recently no-one was making anything as good. This has now changed. Wonderfully for us Pixar now has serious competition. Dreamworks has made a number of films that are as good as Pixar's. Some of them are as good as Pixar's best: How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, Kung Fu Panda. Walt Disney Animation Studios is back on form with Tangled (Monsters v Aliens wasn't bad either).
How to Train Your Dragon & Tangled are thankfully free of transfer-modern-society-into-cartoon-world puns. Instead you are given a detailed, self-consistent world that complements the story (rather than being the story). This is a very good thing—something I hope that Pixar will move back towards (although I don't hold out much hope for Monsters Inc 2).
I think that's a very apt comparison. It's hard to overestimate how deeply personal Cars and Cars 2 are to John, but it's also hard to overstate how tricky they were to pull off.
Sure, you can criticize Cars 2 for having a story that didn't hit the bullseye. Totally fair, by Pixar's own "story, story, story" standards. But don't think the Pixar Brain Trust didn't do so first (as mentioned in the article, things had indeed gone wrong) or that they didn't do heroic acts to make things work. Ultimately it's an artistic process within a movie studio and you sometimes have to put things into production and trust that you can work out the problems. Pixar will bend everything out of shape to delay that point but it still happens. It's the fact that Pixar had done so well rescuing movies from a burning story that makes the rest of us forget that sometimes.
Still, where Cars and Cars 2 started from and how well the stories they had were executed — I think those things are hard to criticize. These movies are love letters to the automotive culture that came of age as John did, and they are both put on the screen with a huge amount of artistry, character, cleverness and humor.
Liked Cars at least better than Monsters Inc. Cars 2, meh. I keep going to see these under the guise that I'm seeing what Pixar technology is capable of, but I think it's at least as much that I like the films.
Cars is my least favorite Pixar movie. Far too much of the payload was nostalgia for the era of Route 66. An era that my parents could have caught the tail end of. I suppose also my personal philosophy is that the past is important but that trying to lock the past in is not a way to commemorate or honor it, but a way of being imprisoned by it, and the central story just falls flat for me. YMWV, of course.
(My next least favorite is Finding Nemo, because Nemo's dad is my mother-in-law, on film. Only she hasn't had the epiphany about needing to let go of worry at some point. Again, YMWV.)
Fair point, there's a market for adult animated movies. But I think it's small.
The scene in Up! which showed the old couples life story was well done, but I doubt any child would really remember it or rate it. It was for sentimental adults and critical acclaim from adults.
Again, the scenes in Wall-E where the robot does boring things for ages without saying anything seemed to be there for adults, and to get oscar nominations, rather than to entertain children.
Just my opinion, but I'm really glad to see them revisiting Cars and Monsters Inc which are favorites with my kids, whilst Up! and Wall-E barely registered with them.
I liked Cars. I absolutely hated Up! and Wall-e with a passion.
Cars is obviously a reasonably simple storyline, but it's a good movie with good characters. Kids like cars shrug it's a movie about toy cars... what's not to like?
Better than an obese highly irritating boy scout kid hitching a lift on a house with an old guy :/
For me, aside from some interesting landscape rendering, Cars isn't in the same league as the other Pixar films. It felt like a pure kids movie + merchandising extravaganza.
> and box office receipts prove my point too
This isn't saying much. The cost-structure of CGI and effects-heavy films is such that you have to essentially make something that will appeal to kids and/or teens, otherwise you're hosed financially.
I can think of many great stories that I'd love to see on screen that wouldn't really appeal to kids + teens, and therefore wouldn't be feasible with the current cost-structure.
The Story outline for cars might seem "terrible," but think about every Pixar movie's outline before you actually saw it? A movie about Toys? A Movie entirely about Rats--whose going to watch that? A Robot who doesn't talk, for how long?
And yet, each and everyone of those movies were astounding, at least in my opinion, but critics and box office receipts prove my point too.
Yes, sequels have a tendency to be purely money ploys, but luckily Pixar's sequels almost exceed the originals (Toy Story 2 and 3). I'd give the future films a chance before you even see a trailer for them.
It's still the only movie my 3-yr-old daughter will sit through. The first 30 minutes is some of the best storytelling ever put to film, IMHO. So much told with so little.
Other Pixar movies like Monsters, Inc. or Cars are either too scary or too talky. Wall-E is the perfect balance, and such a well told story that I never tire of it, either.
The obvious area is in films -- much of the Pixar film work is ray traced as are most of the final high-quality visual effects done in Hollywood.
This is a common assumption, but it turns out to be less true than you'd expect. People associate raytracing with ultra-realistic graphics, so they assume that realistic graphics must be raytraced. But the reality is that graphics creators go out of their way to avoid raytracing because it is slow and harder to tweak for artistic effect. Pixar didn't add raytracing to their main renderer until "Cars". (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/indexAuthorBatali.html)
I think that can be said about most stories with a non-tragic hero.
Except that it's relatively unique to the animation field.
The thing is, Pixar's process is more story focussed than other studios, A typical Pixar film usually has a 4 year production cycle in which the first two of those are spent primarily on writing and rewriting the story to get the "feel" right. Even then, they have no problem with changing the story at the 11th hour.
Case in point - WALL-E's ending was originally very different with WALL-E originally saving EVE from the trash compactors (essentially larger versions of WALL-E for irony). After the film was complete and was screened in Portland, Andrew Stanton changed the ending to what it is today. The story flows better.
Compare that to something like Dreamworks or Blue Sky Studios. Dreamworks focusses on making films which are more technically proficient and aimed at children (Kung Fu Panda was astounding from a technical standpoint) and something like Horton Hears a Who or Ice Age are heavily stylised films.
Dreamworks are more focussed on the business side, rather than the entertainment side of the process.
I first saw Toy Story as a child. Looking back on it as an adult, I remembered that I had a pretty good grasp on the plot and characters as a kid, so I was assuming it had been a simplistic film. When I watched it again, I saw lots of things I didn't notice as a kid.
That's Lasseter's influence as one of the Pixar co-founders. This style has permeated throughout the whole studio. Creativity comes first at Pixar. Ironically, he was actually fired from Disney in the 80's for trying to introduce 3D to their production pipeline and Disney ended up buying Pixar for billions...
They've built up a pretty solid momentum now, and it would take a series of bombs (like Disney after the mid-90s) to shake it.
Funnily enough that's a result of Katzenberg leaving Disney after a disagreement with Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) and he ended up co-founding Dreamworks.
(Though I'm kind of on the fence about Cars.)
Yeah, each of the studios has those little outliers. Monsters vs Aliens has very many adult jokes in it that children just wont get. If you haven't yet seen it, go see it.
For example: This is a quote from one of the US Military Advisors says to the President in a secret strategic meeting to deal with a giant alien robot.
"We need our top scientific minds on this project... Get India on the phone!"
I absolutely laughed my ass off at that joke and I'm sure most people didn't "get it".
I don't know, I disagree with a couple of these points.
Here is the basic recipe for a Pixar film. The main character has to "grow" throughout the film while facing what are essentially adult problems - using animation as the vehicle for story telling.
I think that can be said about most stories with a non-tragic hero.
Dreamworks animations are aimed directly at children because of this influence, the stories are often not as complex and the jokes are simpler.
Of the several PDI/Dreamworks films I've seen, I would say they are at the same complexity level as Pixar's stories. These stories usually have a couple of layers of depth to them, and you only need to follow the obvious one to get the main points. In my opinion, the Dreamworks films are not articulated as well (in both plot and characterizations) as the Pixar films and actually end up feeling more convoluted.
I first saw Toy Story as a child. Looking back on it as an adult, I remembered that I had a pretty good grasp on the plot and characters as a kid, so I was assuming it had been a simplistic film. When I watched it again, I saw lots of things I didn't notice as a kid.
Their marketing teams absolutely blitz the public and this is probably why Shrek 2 is still the highest grossing animated film of all time, even though several films from both studios are better.
Definitely.
Now if the NY Times really wants to make an article about Pixar's future success, they should perhaps write about how the next few films after UP won't be directed by Pixar's main stable of directors (Stanton, Lasseter, Bird and Docter) instead seeing a generational change with new directors handling old franchises.
True. One thing Pixar has going for them is that they haven't made any movies even close to bad. I would say that they haven't even made any movies that aren't great. (Though I'm kind of on the fence about Cars.) They've built up a pretty solid momentum now, and it would take a series of bombs (like Disney after the mid-90s) to shake it.
The people getting upset about Up not being as marketable as past Pixar films will have to get over it. If you're going to get great creative types together and have them make stuff, you have to give them freedom – otherwise you end up like PDI/Dreamworks. In summary: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3472/3398960470_05527c04b1_b.jpg
I experience this already with my six year old when he plays with the neighborhood kids. We have a TV, but we don't have cable, nor do we have bunny ears to get the local stations (not that we could get them in the future anyway). We don't bar them from watching TV (much like the friends and grandparents exception someone else mentioned), and we do all watch kids' movies at home once a week or so. The only bits of kids' culture that they know are Sesame Street (because of a few videos) and the various Pixar movies (Cars, Wall-E, etc).
Ratatouille: Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm, Brian Dennehey
Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin
Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,
Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.
Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.