Fix This Flat

He was referring to a problem that has afflicted film directors almost from the moment of the medium’s birth. A director’s job is, above all, to be the storyteller of a movie, to make the plot and characters come alive. But all too often, directors become obsessed with the technical aspects of moviemaking, especially with the look of the film. Grierson was saying that any director who is more interested in the composition of a frame of film than in the story has lost his way.

That’s exactly the problem with Cars, the latest animated film released by Pixar. Its director is John Lasseter, the founder and chief executive of Pixar and the director of its first great movies, Toy Story and Toy Story 2. The extraordinary thing about Lasseter’s earlier work was the obsessive focus on storytelling and character development. Even though Pixar was bringing an innovative animation technique to full-bodied life in these films, Lasseter never called on his viewers to ooh and aah at the amazing look of the images emerging from his wondrous computers. What mattered–in Lasseter’s two films and in the five amazing Pixar movies that followed them–was the tale itself, told with uncommon wit, speed, and emotional depth.

Cars is the first bad Pixar movie. And that’s because it appears Lasseter fell in love with the way it looked and forgot that he needed to tell a story that would move people. The movie’s cast of talking cars is awe-inspiring, as are the settings in which they move: Utah’s Monument Valley and the NASCAR racetracks where the film begins and climaxes. The play of light and shadow, the subtle way in which the shiny race car gets more and more grimy as the movie goes on, and the evocation of a multivehicle crash are technically mind-boggling. But they aren’t in the least interesting. And neither is Cars, because its characters are poorly conceived and its story is uninvolving.

The protagonist is a cocky race car named Lightning McQueen, who is trying to win the prestigious Piston Cup. He’s selfish, thinks he knows everything, and is a snob. He needs to be taken down a few pegs, and that happens when he finds himself marooned in a small town called Radiator Springs. After a traffic accident, a crusty judge orders him to spend a week fixing the place up (a rather hackneyed plot device stolen shamelessly from the Michael J. Fox movie Doc Hollywood). And wouldn’t you know it? He learns to love and care about people, especially a cute little Porsche.

In Toy Story, Lasseter lavished attention even on the most minor characters and managed to create indelible impressions in a short period of time: a neurotic dinosaur, an acerbic Mr. Potato Head, an obsequious slinky dog. In Cars, all we get are the most obvious clichés: a Hispanic low-rider, a redneck tow truck, a hippie Volkswagen van, a martial Jeep. Lasseter and his crew do nothing but present us with them. They presume we will love them. They are more interested in making sure that the dents on the tow truck are all in the right place.

And it’s a great mystery why Lasseter would hang his entire tale on a character as unappealing as Lightning McQueen, who doesn’t have a single endearing quality and then makes a sudden and weird transformation into a good guy, out of our view, during a sleepless night we don’t get to watch.

Lasseter would have known in his earlier days that he needed to emphasize character and story above all else, just as he would have known that the movie could have been trimmed by 20 minutes with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. And since he is the creative boss at Pixar–and now that Disney has acquired Pixar, of all Disney animation–nobody was able to set him straight.

It’s possible that the tragic loss of his codirector, Joe Ranft, in a car crash last year robbed Lasseter of crucial creative advice he needed. It’s also possible that he was distracted beyond salvation by the Disney-Pixar soap opera that took up so much space in the business sections of the newspaper over these past few years.

Whatever the reason, Cars is a minor fiasco. It has a satisfying final 15 minutes, but it’s very hard to sit through the 91 that precede it. Lasseter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get rid of anything pretty. It appears that, even in the world of computer animation, when no actual cinematography is taking place, it’s still the case that when a director dies, he becomes a cinematographer.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic, and the author, most recently, of Can She Be Stopped?