Pixar Review: Cars (2006)

This is The Chronicles of Trevor, the blog that's you'd want to read all night long. *insert guitar solo*

Tonight, I'm reviewing 2006 animated comedy, Cars. This was the first fully-animated feature to use ray-tracing. This allowed for detailed reflections on the cars and other metallic textures. This was also the final Pixar film to use the 1995 CGI Disney Castle logo variant. I'm watching these films on Disney+, so the logo has been plastered by the 2006 Disney logo.This 1-hour-57-minute G-rated film introduces us to Lightning McQueen, a rookie racecar, giving himself a pep talk, in between each sentence, a second of him racing, presumably from trials. After this, comes a hyped-up sequence set to Sheryl Crow's "Real Gone", which is an amazing fit, especially with the intro, where Lightning exits the Mack carrying him. This gets anyone hyped up for the racing action! After a massive crash that looks like it could possibly be a nod to Saving Private Ryan (which is weird to put in a G-rated film), we see Lightning catch up to his rival Chick Hicks. Lightning decides not to take a pit stop after slickly going through the damaged cars, and later did over 399 laps on one set of tires! Unfortunately, on the final lap, his tires started to pop, letting out sparks and, presumably, destroying the track. The King, Chick Hicks, and Lightning make a world-record photo finish, and as such, a new tiebreaker race was scheduled in California. This segues into one of the best scenes in the movie, the road trip scene set to the best version of "Life is a Highway" (in my opinion), performed by Rascal Flatts. This scene is also just Pixar flexing their updated advancements in computer animation, such as the aforementioned ray-tracing. After Mack gets tired and finally goes to sleep, thanks to gangsta cars that pranked him by playing Kenny G's Songbird, Lightning McQueen loses Mack, who is still going to California. Lightning then finds himself on Route 66, where he finds an extremely small town called Radiator Springs, when he accidentally hits a statue of the town's founder, Stanley, and drags it across the road, destroying it. This road is the only one in Radiator Springs. Lightning was sentenced to fix the roads using a giant asphalt mixer called Bessie. But later, after that, Doc Hudson, mayor of the town, challenges Lightning to a race, and later on, makes the Radiator Springs gang his pit crew, with Doc as crew chief. Lightning races in the California race, unfortunately, the king crashes, but Lightning pushes him to the finish, forfeiting the 1st place victory.

When it comes to animation, this is one of Pixar's best looking films, really pushing the RenderMan system to its limits. I also liked the various references, such as the small birds from "For The Birds", and the Emeryville sign (a reference to the town that Pixar Animation Studios is based in). I really liked the score, provided by Pixar's go-to composer Randy Newman, the nephew of Alfred Newman, composer of the iconic 20th Century Fox fanfare.

I give Cars a 9.5/10

Pros: Memorable characters, best version of "Life is a Highway", nice use of comedy.

Cons: Some plot points, like Bessie, go on for so long.