A battered tow truck with a blue-collar delivery owns Pixar’s latest adventure,”Cars,” much the way a fish called Dory nearly swam off with “Finding Nemo.”
Who’d have imagined a mere two months after he ran out of gas in his first live-action movie, we’d be humming the praises of Larry the Cable Guy? His Mater is the Walter Brennan of computer-generated fare. He doesn’t stutter, but, rust and all, he’s one of those down-home naifs that tickles.
For more than a decade, Pixar has been ingeniously giving life to feature-length characters like Mater, who inhabit surprising worlds. Pixar movies can’t easily be converted into live-action fare. They’re that inventive.
“Cars” is a little pedestrian, by Pixar standards. It’s as if “Doc Hollywood” had been rendered in binary code for the car-seat crowd: A cocky protagonist winds up doing time in a pokey burg where he learns a thing or two about love, values, community and his place in it.
It’s not that the company has run out of gas. Far from it. But clocking in at nearly two hours, “Cars” idles at times. And it’s not until its final laps that the movie gains the emotional traction we’ve come to expect from the “Toy Story” and “Nemo” crews.
Thank goodness, then, for Mater, short for Tow Mater. He lives in Radiator Springs, the town where NASCAR rookie Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) gets his moral tune-up.
Other carbureted citizens include lowrider Ramone (Cheech Marin) and wife, Flo (Jenifer Lewis); Luigi (Tony Shalhoub); and his wee partner in the tire biz, Guido.
There’s Doc Hudson, who hides his glorious past well. Car-racing Paul Newman gives voice to the muscular Hudson Hornet, a Detroit dinosaur that helped launch NASCAR in the 1950s. Sally Carrera, a sky-blue Porsche (Bonnie Hunt), exited Los Angeles’ fast lane and became the narcoleptic town’s No.1 booster.
Bypassed when Interstate 40 made Route 66 the road less traveled, Radiator Springs has fewer visitors than a dusty museum exhibit.
The same can’t be said of the Southern race track jammed with spectators for the the Piston Cup Championship. There Lightning’s bravado puts him in a comfortable lead. His arrogance hands him a photo finish and a three-way tie with “The King” (Richard Petty) and Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton) to be settled in a rematch in California.
In “Cars,” speed is cool. It’s also a culprit. And a plume of nostalgia wafts over this toon. You can find an aching for the open road of Roger Miller, Monte Hellman, as well as “Thelma and Louise.” (Though our fuel-guzzlers and our wide-open spaces are both endangered.) There’s also joy in the guttural revving of engines that makes NASCAR loud and proud.
Directed by Pixar whiz and guiding honcho John Lasseter (“Toy Story”), “Cars” wrestles with the American need for speed, as well as our yearning for a more thoughtfully paced era. If you don’t get this, there’s a James Taylor-sung ballad, “Our Town,” written by Randy Newman.
If this sounds like heady fare for a kid’s flick, it is and isn’t. All the best animation units ply storycraft’s version of vertical integration, where parental ruminations are tucked into the center of colorful candy.
(When the King tells Lightning he’s “got more talent in one lug nut” than all the other competitors, you know who the pun is meant for.)
G-rated, “Cars” shifts into eat-my-dust gear when Mater takes Lightning on an adventure in a nearby field, where they engage in a classic rural prank.
Like an earlier gag in which a posse of nitro-burning hotties straight out of “The Fast and the Furious” toy with Lightning’s Mack truck, this is pure Pixar pleasure.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
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“Cars”
G |1 hours, 56 minutes |ANIMATION|Directed by John Lasseter; written by Lasseter, Dan Fogelman, Joe Ranft, Kiel Murray & Phil Lorin; starring the voices of Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Larry the Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, Jenifer Lewis, George Carlin, John Ratzenberger|Opens today at area theaters
