Cars 2

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Up to this point, I have praised Pixar's quality again and again, offering a lot of great reviews for a lot of great movies. But in the summer of 2011, Pixar would release 'Cars 2'; a film that came out to some rather scathing reviews that suggested this animation company God has suddenly taken a turn for the worse. To this day, it's probably considered the biggest overall disappointment of the Pixar library, having lost that special touch of "deep" they have offered up until now. I completely overlooked it until only a few years ago, first reviewing it here as a 'Catching Up' review.

Our hero from the previous film, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), heads to a race to compete against a new up-and-coming, trash-talking racer named Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro). He allows his best friend, Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), to come along with him, with the slight fear that he might mess things up. Meanwhile, however, Mater is mistaken as an American agent by an international spy named Finn McMissile (Michael Caine). He's then brought on a mission to help stop a group of "lemon" cars, who are plotting against Allinol; the fuel company keeping modern racers in business. The film is more about Mater than McQueen, and all in all, it ends up being pretty forgettable.

I never really and truly thought this film was terrible, but it's easily on the weaker end of Pixar. This was a bit more of a merchandise-pusher than a good story with good characters, and most certainly aimed at a younger audience. On a personal level, I've always thought the 'Cars' series to be a little on the bland side, and more for others than myself. I was never really a gearhead or anything like that, and the most I've ever gotten from any of these was the first one's teachings on, shall we say, "slowing down and enjoying the view". This doesn't have a whole lot to teach other than a few basic friendship concepts that other Pixar films have frankly done better.

This film pulls the whole thing where the sequel is based on the first film's comedic relief, thus knocking the quality down a notch or two. Comedy relief works in a movie because it's off to the side. It provides a laugh while other, more serious things are going on. Once that comedy becomes the plot, there's no comedy relief for that comedy relief, and it just ends up becoming lame. In this case, the comedy relief in question is Larry the Cable Guy, who feels like an incredibly dated act nowadays. But that's also speaking for myself. I think that while I criticize, the film is pretty much harmless for a young audience, and I wouldn't necessarily deter them from checking it out. It's not without its share of fun in that sense, but again, it's incredibly weak in the way of story, and feels very "straight-to-video", but it wasn't.

It may not actually mean much to many, but this is the first Pixar film to earn no Oscar nominations at all. With that, it almost felt official that this was just a kids movie, lacking that typical Pixar magic we've really grown to love over the years. For my money, the company had reached its peak with 'Toy Story 3' and, in a way, this almost feels like them taking a breather from their typical touch. It's sort of as if they said "let's just throw our brains out the window for once." There's nothing about the movie I find insultingly stupid or anything, but I might suggest that this is what Pixar comes up with when they don't really try, and half-ass a project. Let's be fair enough and say we all do this, and no production company actually has a perfect track record.

So, as far as this big, glamorous library of animated instant classics goes, I would probably go with this one being the overall weakest entry into the entire library. For yours truly, it's Pixar's answer to the MCU's 'Thor: The Dark World' - it's lame, it's forgettable, and basically every other title in the series is superior, even if only by a little tiny bit. This was the beginning of a strange dip in quality for Pixar, with more to follow. This was where one might suggest that Pixar officially lost its magic, and we started turning our attention to competing animation companies. In fact, if you can believe it, the Academy's Best Animated Feature category had no hint of Disney that year. Thankfully, we've since seen Pixar pic up the slack, but that was a heck of a time for us big-time Pixar fiends (me, truly joining the bandwagon with 'Up').

2/5

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