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CarsI should probably learn not to underestimate Pixar. When I saw an early trailer for Cars - complete with an automotive booger joke - it looked like a complete loser. Well, we dragged out feet going to see it, but we caught it tonight and it's actually a lot of fun! Structurally it's a straightforward self-realization film: Race car Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson) sees himself as the next great race car, and had a chance to prove it in a race he's travelling across the country for. But he accidentally falls out of his truck, Mack (John Ratzenberger), at night and finds himself up on speeding charges in the middle of nowhere, specifically Radiator Springs, a nearly-dead town on the "mother road", Route 66, which was bypassed by the Interstate decades ago. Sentenced to power a paving machine, Lightning chafes at being half there, especially since the attractive Porsche Sally (Bonnie Hunt) was responsible for keeping him there. Still, he becomes friends with the rusty old tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) and through him and the other denizens of Radiator Springs - especially the crusty old Hudson Hornet named Doc (Paul Newman, who reminded me for some reason of Burt Lancaster as Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams) - he learns that winning races isn't all there is to life. But it's how he gets there that makes it fun! The crackling dialogue is loads of fun as it usually is in a Pixar film, but the anthropomorphizing of the cars is really the most clever bit. Sure, the basic visuals evoke (for some of us) the classic cartoon "One Cab's Family" (with the eyes in the windshields, as opposed to in the headlights as with the Chevron Cars), but they go a lot farther than that, with the tractors, with Mater's antics, with the clever way the town keeps Lightning from skipping out, with Guido's approach to changing tires. (Of course you have to ignore questions of how the cars manage to, say, build anything (such as each other), as the world clearly isn't integrated into the real world in the clever way that the Toy Story films were, but hey, suspension of disbelief. It's all in fun.) The film isn't especially deep, but it stays on track and does a solid job of telling its basic story (unlike The Incredibles, which seemed to want to be something at odds with its premise, and ended up being something of a muddle). If it remains basically a skin-deep film, it's still fun and engaging and makes you feel for the characters. A big step up from booger jokes, and worth watching. Stay for the credits, as they're an important coda to the story.
 Since we were talking about it at coffee this week, here how I'd rate the Pixar films:
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