For All Our Sakes, Let's Hope Life Is Not a Highway

[zustifer]

Sometime last week, someone in one of my classes brought in Cars, the newish Pixar movie. So I put it on, for us to look at while they worked and while I went around to help people out. My students seemed to generally think it was cute, but my constant complaints of 'What the crap was that?!' and 'Are we supposed to think this is funny?' and 'Who came up with this premise, a four-year-old?' and 'What makes the tractors non-sentient?' eventually started to crack their complacent exteriors.
'Maybe,' one of them posited, in an effort to resolve the lack of coherent worldbuilding, 'all humans were transformed into cars. They just turned into whatever car they were most like.' I agreed that this was possible, but then what about the inanimate cars that already existed? No one was willing to go any further with it. I sort of didn't blame them, since it was making me unreasonably angry, but I let it go.

So yesterday, I forced this movie on chmmr and unpleasant and 343. The time had come for Deep Hurting.

We all agreed that it was appallingly bad. I think the best thing about it was the great-looking environments, in which I see Steve Purcell's hand pretty strongly. Nice lighting, nice production design, nice-looking dust and FX.

Everything else worked much less well. The characters were amazingly flat (to the point of some scary stereotypes: the one (stereotyped) black character was married to the one (stereotyped, voiced by Cheech Marin) hispanic character. What is this, Plato's Stepchildren?), and too numerous. There was some love interest no one could possibly care about, and some older mentor figure who never actually did much, and a bunch of other tertiary characters that sat around being 'colorful' (alarmingly stereotypical). Oh, and The Hick. Sigh.

The protagonist's character arc proceeded from Unmotivatedly Jerkfaced Arrogant Car to Car who has LEARNED THE MEANING OF FRIENDSHIP. He seemed to make this change for no real reason; he just sort of eventually developed Stockholm Syndrome or something (originally he was being held forcibly in a run-down town because he did some damage to it). One moment he's being rude to all the cardboard cutouts of townspeople-characters, and the next he's all, heyy, Love Interest! Lemme just flip my switch from 'asshole' to 'awkward!' And you're my friend now, Hick! Even though I never really seem to actually warm up to you, and in fact seem uncomfortable around you most of the time! Aww, it's a treat for all ages.

Really though, the thing that just made me quiver with rage is the universe-building. Okay, we've got a human-free universe, populated instead by cars. The very first thing I wonder about, when hearing such a thing, is okay, how did this come about? [answer: No idea.] How do the cars, not exactly known for their dexterity, manipulate the objects around them? [answer: they don't, unless specially equipped. Once I saw a car use its antenna, which is a pretty serious hack.] What are cars doing with human accoutrements like desks, flowerpots, and flagpoles? Did they build them? How? [answer: uhh...] Why are there farms? Who or what is food being grown for? The cow-painted tractors, which are supposed to be essentially animals (but whose faces are not significantly different from the sentient cars), who owns them? Why is farm machinery less 'human' than road vehicles? [answer: AAGH] I think that there is still something about ever-racheting-up fidelity that demands more thought than the alternative. If there'd been vagueness in the realisation visually, maybe I would have been more forgiving. But I don't think you can have perfectly rendered dust and grime and just expect people to not to have their expectations raised for a cohesive world. I mean, maybe I'm the only one who looked at the car-shaped land formations and said, 'what the heck? Were those created? Is this just some sort of unsettling coincidence?' and I'm reasonably sure I'm in a small group with people who asked 'was this planet seeded with/by car-shaped aliens, eradicating all human life in the process?'

Sincerely, it's like a four-year-old's version of a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a place where there weren't any people, just cars. And the cars drove around a lot, and they drank gas, and when they broke they would repair one another. Okay, I'm bored, let's go play with legos.

In the supplemental material on the DVD, Lasseter said that he made this movie for his young children, whom he'd neglected while working on the Toy Stories. They liked cars, he liked cars, and he totally wanted to do this for them. And he did, and somehow he got everyone to go along with this.

Comments

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

Awesome! I just downlo-- rented this, and I'm looking forward to seeing it even more now. It sounds like a freaking NIGHTMARE.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh, the hate will flow.
Watch also for the poorly individualised faces, and feel the animators wish for arms to work with.

[unpleasant.livejournal.com]

I swear I finished my almost exactly the same entry before seeing your entry. I'm a johnny come lately to the party, but I spent too long in a thesaurus loop for "hate". Needless to say (which is why I'm saying it), I agree with your assessment.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Sweet. Backup.

Haven't seen it...

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Maybe there's a Neil Gaimany excuse for this world, like this world is really the collected dreams of cars, or this is how cars see the world, or 100 cars had the same dream that they ruled the Universe and then all the people were gone but sometimes cats come along and eat the cars.

Re: Haven't seen it...

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Wull, that was sort of what I was getting at with the fidelity thing. If there'd been dream logic, or if things had looked a little more surreal... then I would totally be all over that.
Maybe it's just a little kid's dream after watching a lot of racing, since it is rooted pretty hard in our current reality. Also the little kid is kind of racist due to lots of sitcoms.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

It was appallingly bad, even by the standards of things-airlines-foist-on-me. I wanted those two hours back to just peacefully grind my teeth while the toddlers scream and the guy in front jams his chair into my knees.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, you were _captive_ for it? MUCH WORSE.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

Huh, I really liked it. I didn't have any trouble with the worldbuilding because they clearly hadn't intended, in any way, to make a huge consistent backstory. It was just "there's a world, every being in it is a car of some kind, let's have fun."

Seriously, if you try to decipher most universes that aren't present-day, you get absolute garbage - as far as I'm concerned, an obviously ludicrous setting like that of Cars is just saying "take this on suspension of disbelief and watch the rest of the movie."

Complaining about Cars is kind of like grumbling that nobody could possibly have heard Citizen Kane whisper "Rosebud". It's honestly not the point of the movie. :)

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Wait, are you saying that the rest of the movie had redeeming value for you?
Also, please do not conflate Cars and Citizen Kane. Thank you.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed it. It was funny. I'm not calling it a great work of art, but it was funny and not utterly formulaic - they followed the basic pattern but played around with it.

And when people make a similar mistake between two movies, I'm gonna point it out :P

[unpleasant.livejournal.com]

I would hardly call a script problem with Citizen Kane and an Everything problem with Cars a similar mistake.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

If you're not going to read my objection, don't respond to it. :P

My point is that Cars requires a single point of suspension of disbelief, i.e. "every creature is a vehicle of some sort and the economy works in an undefined way." Whereas Citizen Kane also has a single point, i.e. "someone heard him say Rosebud". It's not an everything problem unless you assume a consistent economy is the entire movie.

Did you come out of Lord of the Rings and say "ha ha, what a retarded movie! Magic doesn't exist! What were they *thinking*"? Because that's the same thing as here.

I'm not talking about the plotline here or anything, note. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it, that's all subjective anyway. I just find "well the evolution and economy don't make any sense" to be a truly bizarre reason to dislike a movie.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you quite understand what suspension of disbelief is. Here's a good summation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief). See the bit about inconsistencies? That's what we're talking about, with making this a believable world. With LOTR, magic is integrated into the world. The world has magic in it, and is internally consistent.
Cars is less so. Also see the part in the wikipedia entry about different people having different threshholds of having their suspension broken.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

My point, though, is that just adding magic removes a lot of the internal consistency. The economy is an incredibly delicate thing, if you want the end results to look like "medieval times". Making work even slightly easier to do has huge repercussions. You can't just "add magic" and leave it at that - it simply doesn't work.

Example: why Create Food is utterly broken. (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=16)

[unpleasant.livejournal.com]

I can only assume you're responding to me.

No, I do think I'll respond without reading your objection. Look. I'm not reading it. Because clearly I didn't when I said you were incorrect in your analogy. An non-story plot point that could have been edited out in its entirety without effecting the story IS exactly like a desperately inconsistent, entirely new world that never tries to offer the viewer anything concrete aside from the idea that the world and everything in it is a car pun support system. I liked the world better when it was a clitoris pun support system, anyways. I, at least, bought that.

I'm sure had I read your comment I would have gleaned that. Hey! You can read this comment. I'm totally letting you do that. Go ahead.

[chmmr.livejournal.com]

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that different people have different tolerances for suspension of disbelief, I think it's simply the case that Cars is way below Pixar's usual standard for being clever with the subject matter they choose. In every other film they've done, they've used the boundaries and quirks of the universe as a platform to be clever. The role of humans in Toy Story is an amusing side detail, in the sequel it becomes a plot focus.

Either way, they consistently succeed in making you not care about whether or not there are any humans in the Bug's Life universe, et cetera, just like Lord of the Rings does the hard storytelling work necessary to make you believe in the fantastic things it shows you. This stuff is the baseline requirement for suspension of disbelief. Most movies clear it without really having to try.

The reason the Cars universe rankles with people is the aggressive halfassedness of it. It's a hand-wave, but not one done really for the sake of whimsy or to prove a point or create a potent metaphor. They either just didn't care, or they're demanding that their audience doesn't. Regardless of whether or not you enjoyed it or whether the fiction bothered you, you have to admit it's understandable that some people felt their intelligence was being insulted, in a way that is totally not intrinsic to "kid's fare".

The perspective in Citizen Kane is very rigorously established, we as the audience hear him say "rosebud" via the author's perspective for the same reason we zoom out the kitchen window to see him playing with rosebud as a child. Authors cut from scene to scene in books, movies jump to what different characters are doing. These things are either assumed or they're established as rules by the author.

The breakdowns in Cars occur at a level above this. It's not a failure to establish the frame, it's a failure of what's in the frame.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

*nods* I basically agree with you there - I think the issue most people have with Cars is that it's a more obvious source of inconsistency, and asks you to take more things on faith. Most movies, as I said, break down badly when you start drilling down into them a little more, but Cars has some of those issues on the surface.

I guess I don't notice as much because I frequently drill down into movies to see how they're put together. I consider "depth of universe consistency" one of those things that's both a variable and not necessary.

I still feel, however, that it's not necessary to resolve it to enjoy the movie. Yes, they could have done the same movie with humans. But they could have done Monsters Inc with humans easily also. The problem with cars is that fundamentally cars are really really similar to humans in a lot of ways, and there's few cases where they're not interchangable.

And there's a sentence I never expected to write.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Okay. Let's do this right.
1. It was just "there's a world, every being in it is a car of some kind, let's have fun."

Obviously. You think this is okay? Has any other Pixar movie ever been so poorly supported by setting and supporting details? If so, please give examples.
I am going to say no. Toy Stories 1 and 2 had well-created universes. Did this inhibit their fun? No, it did not. Bug's Life I hated, but it also had a reasonably plausible world for its characters to live in. Incredibles had a very well done world, to the point that the political climate, the interior design, and the costume design was all appropriate and well-integrated.
'Just having fun' is not an excuse to slack off.

2. Seriously, if you try to decipher most universes that aren't present-day, you get absolute garbage [...].

Please give examples. I do not buy this statement, and I want to know why you do.

3. Complaining about Cars is kind of like grumbling that nobody could possibly have heard Citizen Kane whisper "Rosebud".

I don't think so. I think that these are very different problems, and also I'd never heard of the inaudibility of 'Rosebud' before.
'Rosebud' is a wrap-up, a reference to an earlier point in the movie, and also visually echoed by the actual sled (with name) on the fire. How is this similar to the empty universe of Cars? Suspension of disbelief is not required in Citizen Kane. It is required arguably to watch a movie with cars as its actors, period, but one shouldn't be asked to just let everything go by without a thought.

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

Bugs life was worth it just for the lighting work in the roof-caving-in scene with the grasshoppers attacking.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

1. Toy Story was present-day - it's easy to do a universe that's present-day :P But, if you want to be anal about it, how come nobody has ever seen a toy move? Toys have been around for decades, you're seriously telling me there isn't a single toy, out of the literally billions that have been made, that's decided to buck whatever laws they might have and show themselves? Even accidentally? Why don't stores have closed-circuit TV cameras in that universe, anyway? That'd blow the whole deal instantly.

However, yes. I actually do think it's okay. The universe supports the plotline and the story, not the other way around, and some kinds of stories really don't require plausible backdrops.

2. Lord of the Rings has magic. Magic is never well-defined. Sometimes magicians are far too common - in medieval times one family could barely feed more than their own family, and even a slight edge there through magic would have been huge. Just the occasional rain spell completely changes the whole economy. This goes for literally any movie with magic, because none of them explain this (not that I think they should, I will admit). Of course, most of them also never show farmlands - at best you get a generic city with a bazaar in it. So perhaps everyone is living a life of luxury and only working ten hours a day - but all of this works only if you assume a bunch of things about the background that they never talk about.

And while it's hard to come up with an explanation of how the Cars world evolved, it's easy enough to show how it continues - we do see a car using a tool during it, it's not completely impossible that there are many tool-using vehicles in the world that we're not seeing. (In the same way that fantasy movies never show the small armies of farmers that would be needed.)

Out of the IMDB top 20, 13 of them are set in reality. 3 of them are Lord of the Rings, which I've mentioned already. 2 of them are Star Wars (huge problems of its own - if space travel is as cheap as it seems to be, why does Tatooine need moisture farmers? How expensive would it honestly be to ship water over? If it's not, how does Han Solo flit around the galaxy for so long without making any money? And how the fuck does the Empire manage to hide the Death Star when building it would take a significant fraction of the galaxy's resources?) And one of them is a western, which invariably bear no resemblance to reality - seriously, explain to me where the city-in-the-middle-of-a-desert gets its money from, especially since nobody ever works a non-service job. Bartender, Prostitute, and Sheriff are the only occupations we ever see.

How about the Matrix? I'm just running down the list now and finding movies I know. The described method of power generation - running off human bodies - is absolute garbage. It's impossible to get a net power gain that way because you have to feed the bodies. At best you can break even (and you can't actually break even.) So why are the machines keeping humans around? Who the hell knows. Get rid of that, there goes the movie - the background isn't even remotely consistent because they explicitly state something which is impossible.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is on there. Try to find a single iota of consistency in that movie. Of course, it's a humor movie, so it doesn't matter. Of course, so is Cars.

3. I'm not saying you should let everything go by without a thought. I'm simply saying that, while you can sit around trying to figure out ways the Cars universe is practical, or you can simply say "no it's impossible", neither of those really have much to do with the movie. It just plain doesn't matter. The vast majority of movies don't even give us enough background to claim that they're impractical - the only reason Cars does is because we know a lot about how cars work.

If you just assume that a "car" in that world is a biological creature that happens to be shaped the same as a car, a lot of the problems go away, in fact. And that'd at least explain the giant windshield eyeballs.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

None of those movies is a favorite, but you're essentially right (I'll quibble a bit though: LOTR did not give magic to the common people, only to wizards and elves, who were beyond doing petty things like feeding people. I think the premise works reasonably well. And the Matrix, although heck yes the humans as batteries idea is crap, it's a plot twist rather than a premise. But yeah, I did some complaining about that back in the day.)

Your biological-creature/car idea was pretty much what I was trying to get at with my 'kid's fairy tale' concept, yeah. For me, it doesn't work too well, and I wasn't motivated by the characters to try harder, really. I think that's all I wanted to say just now.

re: Indeed

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

I'l agree that the cars without arms thing bugs me. Just how the hell does McQueen fix the neon anyway? I want to see the damn car on a stepladder waving about...

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

Hell, maybe it's the result of post-apocalyptic genetic engineering. Somewhere, deep in the car-owned factories and car-owned laboratories, are the last pitiful remnants of the human race, the only opposable thumbs left in the entire world, eking out their living under their car masters, constantly at threat of being crushed under their jailkeeper's bulldozer wheels for the slightest misbehavior, still cursing the hubris of their ancestors.

Why, they think, why couldn't you have just added hands.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Incredibles had such a well-done world that I actually started speculating about that world's alternate history and what year it was.

(The answer I came up with: it was actually the early 1970s, but it looked like the mid-Sixties because there had been no Vietnam War and the late-Sixties counterculture never happened. The development of certain technologies had been accelerated by a decade or more, possibly because of the existence of Supers. The alternate Nixon was named "Rick Dicker", was a spooky fixer guy rather than a politician, and was a much happier man.)

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

See, zorba, this is the kind of people we are.
Or, should I say, the kind of person I try to be. We are hard to please in this avenue, is all.

[poupou.livejournal.com]

I agree with what you say, this movie makes me embarassed to be alive. I can only imagine it was some kind of production level error, with some people wanting to make an awesome movie and a bunch of other people wanting to make a different movie, and then they fought about things and then they ran out of time and budget and Cars happened. I like to imagine that a lot of people lost their jobs or quit over this movie. I really have no idea.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

People seriously liked this movie. They went and saw it in the theatre, and bought the toys, and all that shit. I am just very unhappy about this.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

And in fact, I've talked with people who like CARS better than The Incredibles, which they felt to be "too heavy" or something.

re: I loved it

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

Still do. It was ready for release, pulled, re-written, and released again however, so the above may be somewhat correct.

[wasta.livejournal.com]

I was deeply saddened by the trailer for this movie, mostly because I felt betrayed by it. It opens with beautiful scenery and cute little bugs and stuff, then is totally ruined by talking cars. For this reason, I vowed I would never see the movie. It looks like a total waste of talent. HOWEVER, it think it would have been impossible for Pixar to go UP from the Incredibles. They had to fall so they could redeem themselves in the next film. Isn't that the way it happens in modern American cinema?

I'm bored, let's go play LEGO!

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Supposedly the car character design concept (windshield eyes) was taken from a 60s 'cute little car' illustration. Too bad it did not translate too well.

re: Actually

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

It's taken from a 60's disney cartoon with little talking cars with windsheild eyes. It's pretty much a direct rip off really.

Re: Actually

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Well, there y'are.
I wanted to try to search it up, but what crappy search terms.

[wasta.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd base a whole movie on that...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I never saw Cars but I remember seeing the trailer and wondering how it could possibly be good. Then I thought, "It's Pixar, they've got to be able to figure out how to make it good." Then I thought, "Well, actually, A Bug's Life wasn't that great." But Cars looked worse than that.

Apparently it really was that bad. That's a major disappointment considering what an astoundingly brilliant movie The Incredibles was.

[diaryarena.livejournal.com]

IN CONCLUSION:

CARS ARE NOT FRIENDLY LIKE PEOPLE

NOW, THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, THERE'S A COHERENT UNIVERSE!

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Man, I haven't seen that in forever.
Vincent Price did the voice of the villain, right?

re: Well

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

Dang. Who'd a thunk this would cause such a hullabaloo. My .02, I truly believe this movie is little more than fan fic porn for car guys. Nearly every other shot is an homage to car culture. The buried cadillac tails in the desert are an homage to a famous work of pop-art from the 70s, the "hudson hornet" is a real race car and was the first "sports" car to revitalize american industry after the second world war. There are a lot of inside jokes and asides to things even I didn't get, but my buddy Jeff who's in his 50's got right away, only because he spent 25 years working on cars in the midwest. Nearly everything you guys have said regarding this movie is true, but I love it anyway, because I'm a hopless car guy. To say Lasseter made it for kids is a bit simplistic, there's simply too much of the usual level of Pixar research here to be a "kids" flick. If you don't care about cars in life it's hard to care or even get most of the inside info in "Cars". Sometime when I'm out visiting you bostonians I'll run you all through the first five minutes, I have to pause the movie about 15 times in the opening race sequence just to get through all the inside jokes. (One of the RV's is a particular model known for it's large size and frequent brakedowns, etc) I think there's a lot more going on then maybe you realized. Although if you dislike the movie I'm not going to try to hard to change you opinion.

re: Well

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem with cars is the music choise. At least that neuman guy wrote appropriate themes. Auto-tuned modern "singers" fucking up classic drivin' music does not a good soundtrack make.

Re: Well

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, that's sort of another problem. I know I missed a lot of that kinda thing (cept the car talk guys), but it USED to be that the pixar writers would do things on multiple levels. If the rest of the beast had been as well-researched and -thought out, then I would feel differently, probably. Although I really am not into how the formerly cute 60s style car concept translated.

re: Last little bit

[vespizzari.livejournal.com]

I really do agree with both you and miss Kelli about most of your negative points in the movie, but hell, I just enjoy it. Chalk it up to guilty pleasure if you must. I bought it as part of some goofy special Target two pack, in which the 2 is an extra disc of crew interviews, talent interviews, etc. That's where I got the cartoon bit. I'll send you some screencaps and the title if I can find it.