When Steve Jobs made the release date announcement, he stated that the reasoning was due to wanting to put all Pixar films on a Summer release schedule, with DVD sales occurring during the holiday shopping season. It was released on Disney DVD in two different editions: full-screen and widescreen.
Cars opened on June 9 , to positive reviews. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praised it as "one of Pixar's most imaginative and thoroughly appealing movies ever" and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called it "a work of American art as classic as it is modern. Some critics expressed that Cars did not hold up to the standard of other Pixar films due to its lengthy story, especially after the acclaim received by The Incredibles , Pixar's previous film.
In the United States, the film held onto the No. It was the highest-grossing animated film of in the United States but lost to Ice Age: The Meltdown in worldwide totals. Cars had a highly successful run during the awards season. It also had a version of the Pixar short Boundin' as an Easter Egg. According to the Walt Disney Company, five million copies of the DVD were sold in the first two days it was available.
Unlike previous Pixar DVD releases, there is no two-disc special edition, and no plans to release one in the future. There is an extremely rare VHS that was released on February 19 , that has no previews, and it's 2 hours long.
Target's bonus was a Rev'd Up DVD Disc that featured material that was mostly already released as part of the official Cars podcast and focused on the inspiration and production of the movie. It has also been noted that the plot of Cars bears a striking resemblance to that of Doc Hollywood , the romantic comedy which stars Michael J.
Fox as a hotshot young doctor, who, after causing a traffic accident in a small town, is sentenced to work at the town hospital, falls in love with a local law student and eventually acquires an appreciation for small-town values. A sequel to the film, titled Cars 2 , was released on June 24 , It was directed again by John Lasseter, who was inspired for the film while traveling around the world promoting the first film.
Another sequel titled Cars 3 was released on June 16 , The reason for this change is because of some frightening scenes, reckless behavior, and two uses of mild bad language.
Pixar had another idea for getting Lightning McQueen separated from Mack. In this deleted scene, Mack stops at Top Down Truck Stop to get a car wash after a bunch of moths got stuck on his grill on the Interstate. Lightning waits a long time for Mack and eventually gets impatient, so he leaves his trailer to look for Mack. He sees a bunch of trucks at the gas station and goes to look there, where he met Mia and Tia , two waitresses, who were excited to see him and have seen his last race.
Rusty and Dusty Rust-Eze were there too, also excited. Meanwhile, Mack finishes his car wash, but he did not know Lightning was at the gas station, so he drove away without him.
The trucks try offering Lightning some headlights, but he decides he must get back to his trailer, but he cannot find it. He looks at the car wash, but Mack is not there. He sees Mack driving down the Interstate, so he rushed after him, almost crashing after driving through a red light.
He drives up the exit ramp, going the "wrong way" and nearly colliding with the other cars. Suddenly, the whole road was blocked by trucks, forcing him to drive off the road.
A watermelon truck drops a bunch of watermelons on him. Finally, Lightning gets back on the road and continues to try to find Mack. Lightning finally catches up with Mack only to find out it was a different truck.
The truck drove away angrily, leaving Lightning alone at the crossing. He looks to his left where he sees Interstate, so he quickly races toward it. However, clouds form overhead, making it too dark for Lightning to see, causing him to drive off the road.
He falls down a hill and crashes into a bunch of branches. While reversing out, he bumps into a car behind him. He turns around and sees that the car is a dead car, which freaks Lightning out.
He looks around and sees more dead cars everywhere. One was even hanging on the tree. Several of them had branches growing through them.
While trying to escape the graveyard, he crashes into a fence which gets tangled on him. The grill and headlights of another dead car was attached to the fence and got pulled off its car.
Lightning gets back on the road and tries to get away from the dead car's grill and headlights since it looks like a monster. Lightning eventually gets untangled from the fence and drives away. Lightning is asked to do a race in Radiator Springs , but he turns it down and chooses to do standard community service instead. That night, while in the impound, he asks Mater what standard community service is, but Mater says he does not know and says good night.
The next morning, he wakes up feeling quite funny. He looks into a mirror and realizes that his engine has been put into a steamroller. He tries to escape, knocking down a piece of the fence, but Sheriff chased him with his siren.
He flips a switch on the back of Lightning, which deploys a spout that splats asphalt on the road. Then, a paint sprayer deploys and sprays the yellow line in the middle of the road. Meanwhile, Doc had put Mater's engine into Lightning's body, so now Mater is a race car and he is enjoying it, but Lightning was worried he will wreck his body due to the recklessness of his driving.
Then, Mack shows up, but he mistakes Mater for Lightning. Lightning tries to explain the situation, but Mack had already driven away with Mater inside his trailer. Lightning tries to get Doc and Sheriff to stop Mater, but they just want him to continue fixing the road instead. He looks down the road and sees that there is a lot of road to fix, much to his horror.
But the same cannot be said for this film's emotional arc. We're asked by Lasseter and his team to feel sympathy for the loss of a simpler way of life one that is arguably at odds with the technologically groundbreaking animation represented by Radiator Springs.
In Toy Story 2 , we're asked to sob for a character. In Cars , we're asked to sob for Though it was always a small town, it thrived in the days before a freeway took people on a faster route through the country. This, of course, reflects the reality of small towns that were positioned on Route 66, a winding road that has since become far less common.
If you don't care enough about cars or car culture, though, this sequence feels like a truly tone-deaf attempt to gin up nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.
The film surrounding that sequence is similarly on a precarious balance between offering dazzling delights and feeling painfully old-fashioned. The mismatched buddies here aren't quite the same as Woody and Buzz or Marlin and Dory; Lightning instead becomes best buds with the dumb tow truck Mater voiced by Larry the Cable Guy , despite Mater being too blissfully ignorant to be bothered by his new pal's snot-nosed haughtiness.
There's just lots of jokes that feel as if someone at Pixar was a really big fan of the Blue Collar TV comedy program from the early s. Remember Blue Collar TV? There are, frankly, a lot more pop-culture references in Cars than in any other Pixar film to date. It's not that other Pixar films don't quote from prior movies — in the Toy Story sequel's opening scene, Buzz Lightyear hops across a bridge, with each step making a musical note to sound like "Also Sprach Zarathustra" from A Space Odyssey.
There is, however, a difference between an aural joke that works for some adults, vs. Jay Leno playing a version of himself named Jay Limo. You see, because the shortened word for limousine sounds a lot like the name Leno. Do you get the joke? This Flinstones style of humor is a dangerous game to play, especially because it means Cars often fails the test of timelessness. Which is ironic, when you think about how the movie is also arguing in favor of the timeless nature of the slow, leisurely drive throughout the beauty of the American countryside.
The comedy in Pixar's other films to this point don't rely on the audience knowing about certain specific people or shows within popular culture; Cars , to its detriment does. Cars did well when it opened in the summer of , at least domestically. You thought I wouldn't make at least one pun? Come on. Every other Pixar title has topped that number. And we all know that Onward , creative success or not, has a very large asterisk next to its box-office performance.
And yet, Cars did wind up inspiring two sequels, two spin-off films, a series of related short films, and an eventual themed land at Disney California Adventure in the Disneyland Resort.
Cars Land, as it's fittingly called, is an impressive evocation of Radiator Springs. Even for those of us who aren't taken with the so-called World of Cars that this film evinces, the themed land and its centerpiece attraction, Radiator Springs Racers, is stunningly detailed, well themed, and generally the kind of atmospheric, lifelike experience that any great Disney theme park aspires to.
Like the land, of course, Cars feels wholly like the product of John Lasseter. Up to this point in the series, we haven't really talked too much about Lasseter's influence, for a number of reasons; much as he cut a Disney-like figure during his tenure at Pixar, he wasn't often the sole creative voice on any project, even those on which he was credited as director.
With the exception of Brad Bird, it's easier to see the Pixar brand as the auteur, not a specific filmmaker. Cars does feel a bit more Lasseter-like in its execution, detailing how a slick up-and-comer gains appreciation for life and those around him, eventually realizing that he can't do everything by himself.
Incredible argues, for the most part correctly, that great individuals need to be given a great platform. Lightning McQueen learns that he needs help from those around him, even those who might not seem that incredible. Cars is also, like many of Pixar's other films, male-centric. Hunt is the most notable female performer in Cars ; most of the cast members, also including the late and legendary Paul Newman who is unsurprisingly quite good in his last fictional film role as the ex-racer Doc Hudson , are men.
Considering the arc of the Cars movies — it doesn't seem like an accident that the third and final film in the franchise is largely about Lightning passing the torch onto a younger female car — the framing of Lightning's journey in this opener is more fascinating on a subtextual level than as part of the film itself.
To date, Pixar has been nominated 13 times in the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars, and they've won 10 times. In , Cars served as one of their three losses, losing the honor to Happy Feet , in a year when only three films were even nominated. This first film, at least, can lay special claim to the honor of being nominated; Cars 2 and Cars 3 didn't even get that far. The film may have gotten a slightly more tepid response from critics and some audiences, but Cars has survived for 15 years because of its multi-billion-dollar merchandising.
But now the interstates and time itself have passed it by, and the town slumbers on, a memory of an earlier America. Lightning's dream is to win the Piston Cup, the grand prix of American racing. He's on his way to the race when he gets lost, and then, more humiliating, impounded. Once released, he meets the population of Radiator Springs, led by Doc Hudson Paul Newman , who may be an old-timer but probably knows something about Hudsons that Lightning doesn't: Because of their "step-down design," they had a lower center of gravity than the Big 3 models of its time and won stock car races by making tighter turns.
Tractors serve as the cows of Radiator Springs, and even chew their cud, although what that cud consists of I'm not sure. Fan belts, maybe. The message in "Cars" is simplicity itself: Life was better in the old days, when it revolved around small towns where everybody knew each other, and around small highways like Route 66, where you made new friends, sometimes even between Flagstaff and Winona. This older America has long been much-beloved by Hollywood, and apparently it survives in Radiator Springs as sort of a time capsule.
Doc Hudson, it turns out, was a famous race car in his day. That leads up to a race in which the vet and the kid face off, although how that race ends I would not dream of revealing. What I will reveal, with regret, is that the movie lacks a single Studebaker. The s Studebakers are much beloved by all period movies, because they so clearly signal their period, from the classic Raymond Loewy-designed models to the Golden Hawk, which left Corvettes and T-Birds eating its dust.
The movie is great to look at and a lot of fun, but somehow lacks the extra push of the other Pixar films. Maybe that's because there's less at stake here, and no child-surrogate to identify with.
I wonder if the movie's primary audience, which skews young, will much care about the s and its cars.
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