Monday, June 19, 2006

Pixar Running on Fumes

Cars was an incredible bit of lighting, textures, shading, and animation. Too bad the story was boring and putting people asleep. For the first time in a Pixar film, I heard kids paying attention to everything but the movie. Standing up, walking around, talking, totally not into the film. My wife was shuffling as well with her head propped up against her hand in boredom. I even caught myself daydreaming.

The lighting and realism was pretty breathtaking. But I ask myself, "Is this really what I want out of an animated movie?" It was different and technically impressive. Everything else left me uninspired.

Watching animated cars for two hours was too much. Maybe I needed to be a car fanatic to watch this thing. But, I couldn't care about about any of the characters.

Everything felt forced. This was Pixar's first crapper, if you were to ask me.

1 comment:

Jonathan Grimm said...

I think that some people couldn't relate to the story's concept or setting. Personally, I liked Cars because I could relate with it on all levels. I grew up in the country, went to a couple professional car races, my family drove on vacations rather than flew (I got to see a lot of spactacular highway scenery that way), and I have a basic enough knowledge about my own car to relate to the film's automotive terms and jokes.

Regarding the fact that the film didn't hold some childrens' interest. When I first saw the film, I did notice a few kids who paid intermitent attention to the movie. However, the vast majority of children I saw were glued to the screen. I believe the former situation was the result of the unusual amount of complex concepts and dialogue, which kids younger than 6 may have a hard time understanding: For example, why sponsers are so importent in auto racing (a large motivational factor in the story), and we can't leave out Doc's long conversation with Lightning McQueen about why he couldn't race again after he recovered from his crash (see, it's complicated). Dispite all this, kids still want to see the movie again, and their parents keep taking them.

Overall, I have to say that Cars is doing pretty well so far, and it obviously resounds with audiences on some level or another. Hey, it's still in the weekly top 2.