'Cars' is a joyous ride

But, happily, no. That dishonor will have to wait until next summer's "Ratatouille" or beyond, because the buzz got it wrong: "Cars" has turned out to be all pleasure, one of Pixar's most imaginative and thoroughly appealing movies ever.

The first Pixar feature to be directed by founder John Lasseter since "Toy Story 2," it's an irresistible celebration of America's car culture, and a compendium of the wit, heart, flair and originality that have been the studio's hallmark.

The story takes place in an alternate universe of anthropomorphic automobiles, where a cocky young NASCAR star named Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) has ended a championship race in a three-way tie that has to be resolved in a runoff match in California.

On the way there, however, he gets lost via a series of mishaps and winds up in a backwater Southwestern town on old Route 66, where he runs afoul of the local law and is sentenced by the judge -- a 1951 Hudson Hornet (Paul Newman) -- to community service.

With the big race only days away, and his whereabouts unknown to the racing world, the hero car is frantic to escape, but he keeps getting pulled back and, as he gradually makes friends and falls for a sassy Porsche (Bonnie Hunt), he begins to like the place.

Granted, this premise -- the big celebrity finds himself trapped in a small town and has his consciousness raised by its slower pace and good-hearted people -- is an old one that's been done on every classic TV show from "Andy Griffith" to "Green Acres" to "I Love Lucy."

But the miracle here is that the movie actually makes us experience this emotion, pumping us up with an opening sequence of exhilarating flash and speed, then bringing us down with a progression of scenes that skillfully teach the moral: "It's good to slow down once in a while."

In the same way that "Toy Story" stoked the affection people feel for their old toys, "Cars" plays with the nostalgia we feel for those simpler days, when the interstate system had not yet cast a grid of uniformity across the land and every town had its own character.

The texture of the film is as densely layered as a James Joyce novel. It's a gallery of appreciative winks at the history and mystique of the American automobile -- to the point where old-car buffs will be able to watch it a dozen times and still miss many of its references.

And yet it's in no way a cult item. It has that special verve -- which the Old Hollywood had in spades, and the new Hollywood seems to have lost -- of playing to a mass audience on a number of distinct but equally successful levels.

The humanoid-car characters are so endearing that kids will love them, they work so well within their context that adults will "believe" them, and the story line is laced with so much wit, warmth and automotive trivia that everyone can hook into it from some angle.

At the same time, the movie unfolds with a narrative purity -- Pixar believes in its stories -- and absolutely none of the flatulence jokes, sexual innuendo and other crude compromises the competition invariably throws into the stew to pander to the young-boy audience.

As always, the visuals are rendered with a mouth-dropping technical virtuosity that seems to have kicked the art of CGI animation into a whole new generation, and come together to give the film its own distinct and unique animation style.

The cars are cute and the racing scenes are exciting, but even more impressive are the film's epic panoramas of the American Southwest, which seem equally inspired by John Ford, Georgia O'Keeffe and the old Road Runner cartoons, and linger in the mind with a special haunting beauty.

All told, "Cars" is a knockout, and let's hope that now that Disney has bought the studio and Lasseter will be overseeing all of Disney's animation and theme parks, the Pixar magic will not be diluted. Gosh knows, we're entitled to a movie this good at least once a year.