Cars 2 promo art … and lots of it

I'll admit I'm very skeptical of Cars 2. The original Cars was the first Pixar movie that seemed to fall short of the high expectations the animation studio was setting for itself. I'm hardly alone when I say that it creeped me out a little with those plasticy human faces on the front of automobiles.

The second one drifts into theaters next week. Check out some of the film's concept art. It's all hand painted in soft hues and delicate strokes, and it kinda makes me want to see a film that looks like these paintings, which of course Cars 2 does not. All photos are clickable.

Now check out these rather nifty fake travel posters:

As if all that wasn't enough, here is the combined three-panel poster that has been hanging in theaters lately. Damn, these Pixar folks are clever.

From the Vault: Cars, Pixar's first so-so film

In anticipation of the upcoming Cars sequel, here is my review of the original Cars from June 9, 2006. As a note, my newspaper reviews have star ratings: five is the best, one is the worst.

Four stars is the lowest rating I’ve ever given a Pixar film. It’s also the second highest rating a movie can get on my scale. You can make your own deductions from there but if one of them resembles this — “Cars is a superb movie that does not equal Pixar’s much-more-superb predecessors,” said by me — then you’re on the right track.

Cars is beautiful. No, Cars is gorgeous. It’s the kind of movie that makes you forget that all other movie mediums exist. Hand-drawn, live action, Claymation … what are they again? I’m now firmly convinced that Pixar workers even dream in computer renderings, and that those visions are the main inspiration for their movies. How else could such mesmerizing images make it to a movie screen? Magic, perhaps, which is where Disney comes in.

This new one takes place in a world where cars are people. They have their own minds, desires, personalities and dreams. When a racing event is held, cars are driven around a track while other cars watch from the bleachers. And when its time for the wave, instead of standing up they flash their high beams. The cars act and think very much like people, except that all their motivations are related to automobiles: their food is gasoline (different grades being different flavors), their shoes are tires (Lightyears, a reference to a certain Buzz) and their bugs are tiny winged VWs. Also, their personalities are akin to the make of the car: a Porsche is a hot young lady, a rusty tow truck is a twangy-voiced redneck, a Ferrari is an Italian racing stud, the lowrider is a gangster, the psychedelic minibuss is a hippie that blares Hendrix during the morning reveille … and so on. Pixar must have made great use of their Auto Trader Magazine because Cars is like a mall parking lot, each space is a different make, model, color with its own unique dents, dings or paintjob.

The movie’s central hero is a slick stock-car named Lightning McQueen, which must be a nod to wheeled daredevil Steve McQueen (IMDb says different). McQueen is a hotshot rookie driver racing for the Piston Cup, a NASCAR-like oval racing league. After a three-way tie during the last race of the season, race officials agree to a tiebreaker a week later in another city. As McQueen travels, the big  rig (his name’s Mack) pulling his trailer falls asleep and dumps McQueen in Radiator Springs, a sad little town on Route 66. In a panic, McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) tears up the street and is apprehended for speeding. Car jail, by the way, is a tire boot and an impound yard. The next morning the judge (voiced by avid race fan and driver Paul Newman) administers a punishment: Lightning must pull Betty, a road paver that spurts hot tar and asphalt and seems to have come from the depths of Hell.

All Pixar movies have a deep relationship to their central themes and Cars is no different. There’s a lesson here — I’ll let you discover how it’s administered — that suggests all cars feel sadness when they get old and are passed over by other greater models. The movie made me think of my own first car, a Hyundai hatchback. I wondered what kind of personality it must have had. Would it speak Korean? And where is it now? Is it happy? Hopefully some other high school student is using it as their first car and its seeing the road again. These are thoughts that race through your head when you get cozy in this flick.

Cars is filled with wonderful characters, or caracters. Radiator Springs especially is filled with the most delightful makes and models. The crowd’s favorite will be Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy), a tow truck who’s short on friends but full of heart. In his down time he goes tractor tipping until he’s chased off by a mean combine. When he hears of the Piston Cup, he replies, “He did what in your cup?” The Porsche, Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt), owns a hotel where the rooms are garages built around giant parking cones. My favorites were Guido and Luigi, two tiny Italian autos who share many a Europeans’ views on racing: NASCAR isn’t racing, Formula 1 is. The first thing they ask McQueen is if he knows any Ferraris. Then, at the end of the film, Formula 1 champ Michael Schumacher (as a Ferrari, of course) wants a set of tires and the little cars sputter, stall and pass out.

More than anything else, though, Pixar has taken animation to the absolute extreme next level. The animation crew seems to have made more innovations since the last picture than ever before. It seems special attention has been paid to lighting and the illusion of depth. The cars look a little cartoony, or maybe eerily too similar to Thomas the Tank Engine, but the world they inhabit is spectacular. In previous Pixar movies the created world seemed to end outside the scene, like a set that’s too expensive to expand out. In Cars, the horizon can be seen miles away, and when we look down a long, hot road, the asphalt sweats and distorts each mile after it. This is a massive world that has been created for these cars to play on, and they sure do have fun.

So why the lower rating? It’s hard to put my finger on. The premise is hard to swallow. Cars as humans is a little strange, especially those grill smiles and windshield eyes. In the other Pixar movies, the worlds were created around humans: bugs were living in a world we also inhabited, toys were moving around when we weren’t looking, monsters were coming out of our closets while we slept, and fish were swimming in an ocean we were exploring. Cars, though, is void of people and it doesn’t have the same dynamic as say Finding Nemo or Toy Story. Cars is a great picture, don’t get me wrong, but with the absence of humans I think audiences might have some questions: Who makes the cars? Are all movie theaters drive-ins? Is the Ford Taurus the slow, nerdy kid that no one wants to hang around? And even if you don't have questions, it's just kinda creepy.

Or consider this: no humans means no car salesmen. Now that’s a utopia, or maybe autopia.

A fitting finale for a beloved franchise

With their combat grips, bendable poses, interchangeable outfits and intricate moving parts, toys shepherd us from infants into teens. We grow attached to these bits of molded plastic, so much so that they become ingrained in our memories as much as specific events or people.

That is the theme of Toy Story 3. That’s been the theme throughout all the Toy Story films, but in this third one it’s expanded on and deepened to a level where it becomes a meditation on childhood. No longer a child, Andy, the owner of all the fantastic Toy Story toys, has grown up and is heading off to college. As he cleans his room one last time, he finds his old toys stuffed in a chest. He looks down at them longingly, cherishing them for the memories they evoke. There’s a scene where the toys plan an intricate cell phone trick to lure Andy to the chest in hopes he plays with them one last time. Watch the one toy as he clings to the phone, aching as Andy seems to talk directly to him through the receiver.

Later, as college beckons, Andy bags the toys up to stow them in the attic, perhaps for his own children one day. This saddens the toys, especially cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and space ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), but Andy cares about them enough to save them from the garbage and, “At least we have each other,” they keep saying.

The plot allows the bag to be misplaced and it ends up in a donation bin heading to a day care center, where they meet lots of new toys, some kind and gentle, and others that are cold and manipulative. They also meet their new owners, toddlers still prone to stick things up their noses and cause other variations of toy nightmares — at one point cowgirl Jessie has her beautiful red-yarn ponytail used as a paintbrush. The day care that had looked so promising is more like a prison sentence, which prompts some Great Escape and Cool Hand Luke references — "Not in your bunk by lights out, you spend a night in the box." — eventually leading up to a lengthy jailbreak sequence that becomes more terrifying with every twist and turn.

Under all this, though, there’s an underlying theme of sadness, the kind that comes when people grow up and have to shed the things of their youth. There is an unmistakable innocence when a child plays with a toy — the smile and the laughter are so pure and genuine. And when the toys are gone, it’s time to grow up and some of the innocence is gone. Woody craves that again. It hurts to watch him crave it. Pixar, the animation company behind the Toy Story franchise, are expert storytellers, and the scenes they’ve created (Jessie's Emily sequence from Toy Story 2, the aging montage in Up, the love story in WALL•E) are some of the most poignant and heartfelt in all of cinema. They create another in Toy Story 3, when the toys embrace their destiny and join hands in a final act of friendship. It’s one of the most heartbreaking and touching moments of any Pixar film. In the end we all want to be loved, even toys.

As for the nuts and bolts, Toy Story 3 is simply spectacular. The animation is breathtaking, with colors splashing from the screen in mesmerizing Technicolor waves. The animation is so detailed and brilliant, it seems impossible that it was even made. Watch how Woody runs down the street in a full gallop, with arms flailing and legs pounding the concrete. The lighting is especially brilliant, with each scene being cast in lovely lunar blues, soft greens or rich, warm reds evoking the golden beams of a sunset.

The voice acting is again top-notch, and all the regulars return. I never tire of Tom Hanks’ voice, nor the voices of Wallace Shawn (Rex), Pixar regular John Ratzenberger (Hamm) or, my favorite, Don Rickles (Mr. Potato Head). Slinky Dog returns, but Jim Varney, who passed away in 2000, does not. There’s an extended sequence where Buzz Lightyear’s factory settings are reset and he speaks in Spanish, which should be interesting in Arizona, a state trying its hardest to silence that wonderful language.

New characters join the cast, too, including a fashion-conscious (and very metrosexual, if not homosexual) Ken doll (Michael Keaton), a purple teddy bear who runs a toy chest like Chairman Mao (Ned Beatty), a wily little triceratops, and a lederhosen-wearing hedgehog named Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton). Some of the new characters are toys that belong to cute little girl Bonnie, who’s animated so perfectly you’d swear you were watching a real toddler. (And speaking of Bonnie, would it be unfair to wonder aloud if she's a slightly older Boo from Monster's Inc.? I think not.)

As always, Pixar’s creativity, inventiveness and sense of humor are ever present, too. Watch how the more mature toys play roulette — with a See ’n Say (Toy: “Five Monopoly dollars on ‘The cow says moo’”). Or when Mr. Potato Head transplants all his parts onto a flour tortilla and then flops around during the jailbreak. The opening scene, which mirrors the opening of the original Toy Story, imagines the dreams and playfulness of the child's mind. Great care was taken to craft these characters, the things they say and do, and the plot that contains all of them.

This series didn’t need a finale. But now that it’s here I can’t imagine it ending any other way. Pixar, with Toy Story and all its other films, has found a way to take the human spirit and transfer it into objects as inanimate as plastic toy cowboys. While watching their films we see fish, monsters, bugs, robots and cars, but what we're really watching up there is us. We’re watching humanity play out in miniature. And for us to grow so fond of these fish, these monsters, these bugs and robots — and yes, these toys — then Pixar has truly done something beyond remarkable.

2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.

Up, up and away: Pixar does it again

Another Pixar movie and another grueling stress test on my thesaurus — “beautiful” can only be written so many ways in so many reviews. For Up, I think “resplendent” is a fitting variation.

Once again, Pixar’s animators and storytellers have outdone themselves with this dreamy, wide-eyed wonder of an adventure tale starring, who else, a plucky octogenarian and Boy Scout geekus who’s missing his Assist an Octogenarian Across the Street Merit Badge — “You’re going to feel so assisted,” he tells the man many years his senior. These are hardly the superheroes of other animated movies, which is why they work so wonderfully in this crowd-pleasing triumph of a film that transcends the adventure it so easily dispenses.

The animators dream as children dream: in vibrant colors, peppy cartoonish motions, panoramic vistas and easy-to-understand language, all of it skewed slightly off center, like a picture frame hanging ever so slightly to one direction, with the result being some strangely shaped characters and a tilted sense of humor. And, of course, the dogs talk, but there’s a logical explanation for that.

The old man is Carl Fredrickson (Edward Asner). He probably looks like your grandfather, or a caricature of your grandfather, with these big square mitts, a pinkish nose as a round as a baseball and a chin so horizontal and level he could be a carpenter and he wouldn’t have to carry as many tools. He’s assembled with a broad collection of old-man gags: his front door is dead-bolted with primary and secondary locks with reserves and backups just in case, his teeth are kept in a jar at night, and his cane’s feet are fitted with tennis balls, Wilsons I think. Although we never see how he carries his money around, we can assume that it’s in one of those little rubber pinch purses. He may be old, and a widower, but he’s no crotchety miser; he has a tender, albeit grumpy, countenance and the soul of a kitten.

Carl’s home is being encroached on by big business — Enron, Countrywide, Starbucks, take your pick — so rather than be the victim of an open-and-shut eminent domain case he harnesses thousands of helium balloons to his house and floats right out of town. The Boy Scout (Up’s version is Wilderness Explorer) is found stuck on the porch at a cruising altitude of 5,000 feet. His name is Russell (Jordan Nagai) and “precocious” only begins to crack him. He admires Carl’s flying home: “Wow! Most people take a plane, but you took your whole house so you could bring your TVs and clocks and stuff.”

After they land, Russell goes into Wilderness Explorer mode as he puts together a tent and, like all tents, the poles are in control of the construction at all times. The scene ends with the poles erected up through Russell’s shirt and catapulting the rest of the parts out of sight into a canyon, a conclusion so realistic that camping enthusiasts will nod in agreement. Russell, not an ounce of gloom in his eyes, says dryly, “Tents are hard,” and then bounces back as if nothing happened. He’s a cute kid, for sure, but his rejuvenating optimism fills Up’s bedsheet sails.

Carl and Russell, separated in age by about seven decades, soar off to South America — Russell: “It’s like America, but south” — to find a lost rainforest where Carl can read his AARP magazines in peace. (Although, it's unlikely he'll be able to pick up a signal carrying Lawrence Welk.) The adventure leads them into the clutches of a long-forgotten explorer, a giant bird named Kevin, a zeppelin complete with an on-board dinosaur fossil museum, and a colony of dogs wearing special collars that translate their doggy brain waves into English, Japanese, or Hillbilly … whatever the occasion calls for.

Some of the dog scenes went on a little long for my taste, but that’s as close I’ll let a complaint get to Up, a breathless delight of a picture that endears itself to us with its lovable heroes with real personalities and swashbuckling adventure. Children will adore all the high-speed chases and aerial battles, but the adults will be drawn to the stars, mainly Carl Fredrickson.

The film sets up Carl in a way I wasn’t expecting, through a wordless musical montage that flashes back on his childhood, right after he first encounters Ellie, the girl that will eventually become his wife. They meet as youngsters, sprint through adolescence together, marry and then splash each other’s lives with joy so endurable it never leaves the screen, even when the wife does. In one small little scene, the passage of time is gauged by the tying of Carl’s ties. One day he’s a young man, and a dozen or so ties later the camera pans up and he’s gray and wrinkled. What happens next is a Bambi moment handled in a brave, yet entirely honest, way. If you don’t cry, or if microbes of moisture don’t appear somewhere on your eyeballs, then you’re a Cylon or a terminator or some kind of mechanical can crusher. It’s poetic, heartbreaking and, yes, beautiful.

Up also moves a mile-a-minute, especially with its jokes, which seem to come bounding out of the jungle from all directions. Some of the humor is simple visual gags, like flamingo-looking Kevin mimicking Carl and thumping his head with its beak. And then some of it is deadpan irony at a level that’s almost sinister. For instance, one of the talking dogs, Dug, tells a joke with this punch line: “It is funny ’cause the squirrel is dead.” The setup, which I will let you discover, is brutal and maybe not all that funny, but its inclusion in a film like Up seems noteworthy.

Above all else, Up’s creativity is exquisite. The way the house is brought into and out of the picture must have been a challenge for writers, yet here it all makes complete sense. And the house provides most of Up’s visual language: Carl steering it through the clouds, him and Russell dragging the floating residence through the jungle with a garden hose, camping underneath it during a rainstorm, the look on Carl’s face as balloons periodically pop and the porch hangs even closer to the ground. Homes are just vessels for our lives, and this home is a vessel for the whole film, yet also so much more.

No studio in the history of filmmaking is this consistent. Each new Pixar film is a treasure, and each new character is a gem. Meanwhile, box office analysts say Pixar can’t make money or win hearts with loveable monsters (Monsters Inc.), robots that communicate non-verbally (Wall•E) or geriatric seniors and their nerdy Wilderness Explorer helpers. What do the analysts want, demographic studies showing that children want slang-spewing, spiky-haired ’tweens on skateboards? That’s what’s going to kill the Disney Channel, but not Pixar.

Not Pixar.