kartooner

After releas­ing Find­ing Nemo — one of my all-time favorites, right up there with Toy Story — Pixar announced that they were work­ing on a film about cars. When I first heard the news I think I might’ve been read­ing an issue of Wired and sat in disbelief.

While the talk­ing ani­mal shtick has worn out its wel­come, there’s a cer­tain safety net that accom­pa­nies an ani­mated film of that nature. Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that talk­ing ani­mals is a for­mula that has been used by sev­eral ani­ma­tion com­pa­nies (Dis­ney and Warner Broth­ers comes to mind) in the past and for the most part, if done cor­rectly, appeals to a vast audience.

While I passed up the oppor­tu­nity to see the movie in the the­ater I did man­age to rent it this past week and it’s safe to say that Cars, despite it’s main char­ac­ters being talk­ing vehi­cles, does work and only because Pixar is at the helm. I’m not entirely sure whether some­one else with this mate­r­ial would’ve been able to make it as inter­est­ing and worth watch­ing, which goes to show that Pixar could prob­a­bly make talk­ing rocks watchable.

The plot is sur­face deep, but the gen­eral out­line is that it involves a pompous NASCAR race car named Light­ning McQueen (per­fectly voiced by Owen Wil­son) who through the course of the movie hum­bles him­self thanks to a few small town denizens who teach him how to slow down in life.

There’s a life les­son here that resounds in all of us, that life is some­times too fast paced for us to real­ize that every­thing is com­ing at us at a blur. It’s been tack­led before in movies but never using a car as the pro­tag­o­nist, who is quite lit­er­ally the embod­i­ment of fast-paced life.

On the other side of the spec­trum, there’s even a deeper les­son about how we are will­ing to sac­ri­fice beauty to shave a few min­utes off our travel time. In the movie, it’s Route 66 that at one point in time flour­ished with tourists and car enthu­si­asts and now stands as reminder of what once was and will never be.

The movie itself is full of chuck­les from the sup­port­ing cast and when it’s all said and done it really does stay with you. I’m an advo­cate of slow­ing down every once in a while, tak­ing a step back, enjoy­ing the sweeter aspects of life (like love, fam­ily and rela­tion­ships) and fig­ur­ing things out instead of let­ting every­thing fall into place.

As the Racal Flatts’ song ‘Life is a High­way’ tells us, “Life’s like a road that you travel on, When there’s one day here and the next day gone.”