Review: Cars

Review: Cars

Have you seen Doc Hollywood? You’ve seen this, then.

There’s no escaping that this is a direct take on that story, but it’s done with Pixar’s usual flair, love and attention to detail. The humour is a little weaker than we’re used to, the animation is as splendid as always. The characterisation and voice talents are superb. Who’d have believed that you could care this much for hunks of tin?

Pixar really do show the way in how digital techniques should be used. I’ve long ranted about how digital characters don’t seem to truly interact with their environments or with other characters whether digital or not. In Pixar films it just doesn’t seem to matter.

As yet digital characters don’t work properly. Even the wonderful Gollum is just not quite there yet. As close as I’ve seen, but still not quite touching everything. Take these characters out of a situation where it matters and the difficulty with them vanishes, especially when they’re not human. We’re really good at picking up on visual clues from one another. A surprisingly large amount of our communication relies on visual signals and the digital characters don’t send them. When the character is a car, a monster or a toy you can accept their absence because they’re not human.

Cars is by no means Pixar’s finest hour but it’s a lot better than most of the other drivel being passed off as entertainment.