Cars - Movie Review

Cars (2006 - Disney/Pixar) (Amazon Link)


As a treat we all popped along to see Cars on Weds night. We've been seeing trailers for this for a year now and we were all expecting great things.

We thought it was a fantastic hour and a bit long movie.
Which is a problem because the actual film is 121 minutes long.
(Compare this with Toy Story - a brilliant 80 minutes).

Louise fell asleep in the middle, I started thinking about how good the Incredibles was compared to this, and even Molly started to get a little restless.
(and she sat through the bloody Spongebob Squarepants movie.)
Now, please don't misunderstand, it's good. But Pixar's problem is one of an incredibly high quality threshold. Any new Pixar film has to be compared against the standards set by Toy Story 1 & 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and the Incredibles. And it just fails.
The characters are nice, the animation is every bit as stunning as we've come to expect and there are some lovely gags all the way through.
It's just let down by the story. Incredibly predictable, even down to being able to not only guess the exact ending, but being able to guess exactly what happens to get to the ending.
Now this is great for standard cartoon movie fare. But what has been so incredible about Pixar so far is that their movies transcended the cartoon genre and became great movies in their own right.
Cars isn't. To be honest, it's not even a really great cartoon movie. It's fun, entertaining and a great afternoon out, but compared to what's come before, it's a monumental failure.