Cars (film)

Cars is a 2006 animated feature film produced by Pixar and directed by both John Lasseter and Joe Ranft. It was the seventh Disney/Pixar feature film, and the final film by Pixar before it was bought by Disney. Set in a world populated entirely by anthropomorphic cars and other vehicles, it features voices by Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech Marin, Jenifer Lewis, Tony Shalhoub, John Ratzenberger, George Carlin, Larry the Cable Guy and Michael Keaton as well as voice cameos by several celebrities consisting of Billy Crystal, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Bob Costas, Darrell Waltrip, Jay Leno, Michael Schumacher, and Mario Andretti.

Cars premiered on May 26, 2006 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina, and was released on June 9, 2006, to generally favorable reviews. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film. It was released on DVD in late 2006 and on Blu-ray Disc in late 2007. Related merchandise, including scale models of several of the cars, broke records for retail sales of merchandise based on a Disney/Pixar film, with an estimated $1 billion in sales.

Plot

The last race of the Piston Cup stock car racing season ends in a three-way tie between retiring veteran Strip "The King" Weathers, perennial runner-up and dirty fighter Chick Hicks, and rookie Lightning McQueen. A tiebreaker race is scheduled for one week later at the Los Angeles International Speedway. McQueen, eager to start practice in California as soon as possible in order to become Cup champion and gain the sponsorship of Dinoco Oil, pushes his driver Mack to travel all night long. Mack is too exhausted to notice when McQueen, asleep, falls out the back of the truck. McQueen awakes in traffic and speeds off to try to find Mack, but ends up in the run-down town of Radiator Springs, inadvertently tearing up its main street. McQueen is arrested and tried the next day by the town's judge and doctor, Doc Hudson, who at first wants McQueen out of town as fast as possible, but at the insistence of Sally Carerra, the town's lawyer, assigns him community service to repave the road.

McQueen finds that the job of pulling the asphalt-laying machine requires a slow pace despite attempts to complete it faster. As the days pass, McQueen becomes friends with many of the townsfolk, and learns that Radiator Springs was once a popular waypoint along U.S. Route 66, but effectively disappeared from the map when a nearby interstate was built and bypassed the town, causing many of the businesses and residents to leave. McQueen also discovers that Doc is actually the "Hudson Hornet", a three-time Piston Cup champion forced to retire after a racing accident, who chose to disappear quietly in Radiator Springs. McQueen, encouraged by his new friends, successfully completes the road and spends an extra day in town, cruising with Sally and partaking of businesses from the remaining shops to get a new paint job and tires. However, that night, Mack, followed by the media, finally catches up to McQueen, who reluctantly leaves Radiator Springs in order to make the race on time.

As McQueen prepares to race, his thoughts keep returning to his new friends, and distracts him from performing well. However, he is surprised to discover that Doc, outfitted in his "Hudson Hornet" colors, and others from Radiator Springs are serving as his pit crew. Encouraged by their presence and their incredible pit stop speed, as well as using tricks he learned from them while in Radiator Springs to overcome Chick Hicks' dirty tactics, McQueen is able to gain the lead. On the last lap of the race, Hicks purposely runs into The King to try to catch up to McQueen, sending The King into an accident. McQueen stops inches short of winning the Cup to drive back and push The King across the finish line, preventing what happened to Doc from happening to The King, and allowing Hicks to take the Cup. After the race, Hicks is shunned for his tactics despite his victory, while McQueen is praised by The King and his wife as well as the press and crowd for his sportsmanship. McQueen returns to Radiator Springs and announces that he will set up his off-season headquarters there, helping to revitalize the town and its business, much to the pleasure of his new friends.

Production

Unlike most anthropomorphic cars, the eyes of the cars in this film were placed on the windshield (which resembles the Tonka Talking Trucks, as well as the characters from Tex Avery's One Cab's Family short and Disney's own Susie the Little Blue Coupe), rather than within the headlights. According to production designer Bob Pauley, "From the very beginning of this project, John Lasseter had it in his mind to have the eyes be in the windshield. For one thing, it separates our characters from the more common approach where you have little cartoon eyes in the headlights. For another, he thought that having the eyes down near the mouth at the front end of the car made the character feel more like a snake. With the eyes set in the windshield, the point of view is more human-like, and made it feel like the whole car could be involved in the animation of the character. The characters also use their tires as hands and feet, the exceptions being the various tow truck characters who sometimes uses their tow hooks, and the various forklift characters, who use their forks.

The original script (called The Yellow Car, about an electric car living in a gas-guzzling world) and some of the original drawings and characters were produced in 1998 and the producers agreed that Cars would be the next movie after A Bug's Life, and would be released in early 1999, particularly around June 4. However, that movie was eventually scrapped in favor of Toy Story 2. Later, production resumed with major script changes.

In 2001, the movie's working title was Route 66 (after U.S. Route 66), but in 2002, the title was changed to prevent people from thinking it was related to the 1960 television show with the same name. Also, Lightning McQueen's number was originally going to be 57 (Lasseter's birth year), but was changed to 95 (the year Toy Story was released), the number seen in the movie today.

Cars was originally going to be released on Friday, November 4, 2005, but on December 7, 2004 the movie's release date was changed to Friday, June 9, 2006. Analysts looked at the release date change as a sign from Pixar that they were preparing for the pending end of the Disney distribution contract by either preparing non-Disney materials to present to other studios, or they were buying time to see what happened with Michael Eisner's situation at Disney. When 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.

Cars is the last film worked on by Joe Ranft, who died in a car crash in 2005. The film was the second to be dedicated to his memory, after Corpse Bride. This is also Paul Newman's last movie before his retirement in 2007 and his death in 2008.

The international versions of the film have some English text replaced by text in the local language. For the DVD it becomes the language that you choose upon inserting the disc. It's the first Walt Disney Animated Feature dubbed to Ukrainian language. The replaced text includes, for instance, the "Cars" movie logo, Doc's newspaper clippings, the "Closed" signs in Los Angeles and the "Lead lap" text during the last race. The Russian title of the film is "Тачки" (TAh-chki), which translates to "wheelbarrows," and is in common usage as a slang term for cars.

Development

For the cars themselves, Lasseter also visited the design studios of the Big Three Detroit auto makers, particularly J. Mays of Ford Motor Company. Lasseter learned how real cars were designed.

Computers used in the development of the film were four times faster than those used in The Incredibles and 1,000 times faster than those used in Toy Story. To build the cars, the animators used computer platforms very similar to those used in the design of real-world automobiles.

Settings

The landscape in the background behind Radiator Springs is made up of rock formations intentionally reminiscent of Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. The road map shown in the montage history of the town calls the area "Cadillac Range." Some of the mountain peaks in Cadillac Range, shown during the movie, resemble the quarter panels of late-50's Cadillacs, with their distinctive tailfins.

Radiator Springs and vicinity

• The story of Radiator Springs is loosely based on Amboy, California in the Mojave Desert -- a town that showed a decline in almost all traffic when I-40 opened in 1972. Sally references this in the film.
• A landmark, called Radiator Cap, overlooks the town, and has two white letters ("R" and "S") written upon it, similar to the white "T" painted on Tucumcari Mountain. In the PSP version of the game, there is a track called Radiator Cap Run.. The style and relative positioning of these letters on the landmark closely resemble the "RS" badge used on the first-generation "Rally Sport" Camaros.
• Willy's Butte resembles the landmark of Mexican Hat, Utah.
• Nearby "Ornament Valley" (a reference to Monument Valley) is derived from the rugged Black Mountains (Arizona) and the famous Cadillac Ranch sculpture in Amarillo, Texas.
• Lizzie’s Curio Shop in Radiator Springs resembles the crazy Route 66 jumble of memorabilia and knickknacks at Hackberry General Store in Hackberry, Ariz., and the SandHills Curiosity Shop, aka the City Meat Market building, in Erick, Okla.
• The bridge that McQueen sees Sally driving on resembles several bridges on Route 66, including the Cyrus Avery Route 66 Memorial Bridge in Tulsa, the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena, Calif., and the now-closed bridge over Diablo Canyon at Two Guns, Ariz.
• Flo's V8 cafe looks like a V8 engine head on,with a circular air filter, tappet covers, spark plugs and pistons and connecting rods as the supports for the shelter. The blinking neon lights on the spark plugs blink in the firing order of a Ford flathead V8.

Route 66

To quote the Pixar crew:

"As we traveled on Route 66, we were privileged to visit many places and to meet a number of people who live and work alongside 'The Mother Road.' The following is a list of the places and people we wanted to honor by including their names in our 'Special Thanks' credits at the end of the film."

The Cars soundtrack has two versions of the classic Bobby Troup jazz standard "Route 66" (popularized by Nat King Cole), one by Chuck Berry and a new version recorded specifically for the film's credits performed by John Mayer.

Among the many references to Route 66 landmarks and personalities:

• The Cozy Cone Motel's design is based on the two Wigwam Motels along Rt. 66, in Holbrook, Arizona and Rialto, California. These were once two out of seven built motels, with individual cabins shaped like teepees. Three Wigwam Motels remain; the third (and oldest) is in Cave City, Kentucky, far from Route 66. The recently restored Tee Pee Motel in Wharton, Texas, south of Houston, is of similar design but unrelated. The name "Cozy Cone" was inspired by the Cozy Dog Drive-In of Springfield, Illinois, which lays claim to being birthplace of the corn dog.
• The character "Fillmore", referring to the famous San Francisco music venue The Fillmore, was at one time to be named "Waldmire" after Bob Waldmire, a self-proclaimed hippie artist known to Rt. 66 fans for his detailed pen-and-ink maps and postcards of the route. Though Waldmire's family owns the Cozy Dog Drive-In, Bob, now a vegan, preferred not to see his name put on a character that would become a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.
• Ramone's House of Body Art is based primarily on the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. It opened in 1936 as Tower Conoco (from its distinctive Art Deco spire) with the U-Drop Inn Cafe and a retail building attached. Many other establishments built along Route 66 in its heyday had Art Deco elements that might be reflected in the design of Ramone's.
• The yellow billboard for Lizzie's Curio Shop reading "HERE IT IS" with an image of a Model T is based on the Jack Rabbit Trading Post signage in Joseph City, Arizona.
• Sheriff is voiced by Michael Wallis, an American historian and author of Route 66: The Mother Road.

References to other Pixar films

Soundtrack

Vehicles and voice cast