On the way to the biggest race of his life, a hotshot rookie race car gets stranded in a rundown town and learns that winning isn't everything in life.
Cars is a 2006 American animated sports comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Chace! Studios. The film was directed by John Lasseter, co-directed by Joe Ranft, produced by Darla K. Anderson, and written by Dan Fogelman, Lasseter, Ranft, Kiel Murray, Phil Lorin, and Jorgen Klubien, and was the final film independently produced by Pixar after its purchase by Disney in January 2006. The film features an ensemble voice cast of Owen Wilson, Paul Newman (in his final voice acting theatrical film role), Bonnie Hunt, Larry the Cable Guy, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Michael Wallis, George Carlin, Paul Dooley, Jenifer Lewis, Guido Quaroni, Michael Keaton, Katherine Helmond, John Ratzenberger and Richard Petty, while race car drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr. (as "Junior"), Mario Andretti, Michael Schumacher and car enthusiast Jay Leno (as "Jay Limo") voice themselves.
Cars is set in a world populated entirely by anthropomorphic vehicles. The film follows a selfish and arrogant young racecar named Lightning McQueen who, on the way to the biggest race of his life, becomes stranded in a forgotten town called Radiator Springs, where he learns to be humbler and more respectful towards others.
Development for Cars started in 1998, after finishing the production of A Bug's Life, with a new script titled The Yellow Car, which was about an electric car living in a gas-guzzling world with Klubien writing. It was announced that the producers agreed that it could be the next Pixar film after A Bug's Life, scheduled for a 1999 release, particularly around June 4; the idea was later scrapped in favor of Toy Story 2. Shortly after, production was resumed with major script changes. The film was inspired by Lasseter's experiences on a cross-country road trip. Randy Newman composed the film's score, while artists such as Sheryl Crow, Rascal Flatts, John Mayer and Brad Paisley contributed to the film's soundtrack.
Cars premiered on May 26, 2006, at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina and was theatrically released in the United States on June 9, to generally positive reviews and commercial success, grossing $462 million worldwide against a budget of $120 million, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2006. The film received two nominations at the 79th Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature, but lost to Happy Feet (but won both the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature and the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film). The film was released on DVD on November 7, 2006, on VHS in limited quantities on February 19, 2007, and on Blu-ray on November 6, 2007. The film was accompanied by the short One Man Band for its theatrical and home media releases. The film was dedicated to Joe Ranft, who died in a car crash during the film's production.
The success of Cars launched a multimedia franchise and a series of two sequels produced by Pixar and two spin-offs produced by Chace! Television Studios, starting with Cars 2 (2011).
Plot[]
In a world populated by anthropomorphic vehicles, the Dinoco 400 race marks the climax of the Piston Cup season. The event intensifies a rivalry between the retiring seven-time champion, Strip "The King" Weathers, the cunning Chick Hicks, and the talented but arrogant rookie, Lightning McQueen. Desperate to win and gain entry into the prestigious Dinoco team, Lightning struggles with teamwork due to his self-centered attitude. During the high-stakes race, Lightning avoids a major collision instigated by Chick but loses the lead by refusing to take a pit stop, causing his rear tires to blow out before he can win. The race ends in a three-way tie, setting the stage for a decisive race at the Los Angeles International Speedway in one week.
After the race, Lightning rushes through the night on the interstate to reach California with his transporter, Mack. A mishap leaves Lightning stranded alone in the rundown desert town of Radiator Springs, where he inadvertently damages the main road. As a result, Lightning receives an unexpected community service assignment: repaving the road under the supervision of the town's judge, a Hudson Hornet named Doc Hudson, who is prejudiced against Lightning for being a race car.
Lightning repaves the road shoddily in a rush to leave, and Doc challenges him to a race for his freedom on the condition that he starts over and repaves the road correctly if he loses. The overconfident Lightning, having never raced on a dirt track before, spins out on an unbanked turn and crashes. Doc handles the track with no problems and wins the race. Over time, Lightning begins to warm up to the town and befriends its residents, especially Mater, a rusty tow truck, and Sally, a Porsche 911 who dreams of reviving Radiator Springs. As he bonds with the locals, Lightning helps rejuvenate Radiator Springs and develops a newfound appreciation for its charm. He discovers the town was once a bustling attraction for drivers on Route 66 before the construction of Interstate 40 caused them to lose all their business traffic. Lightning also discovers that the bitter Doc, reticent about his past, used to race as the legendary Fabulous Hudson Hornet until a disastrous crash ended his career. Lightning is dumbfounded that Doc considers his previous Piston Cups as being worthless.
Lightning finishes repaving the road and decides to stay in Radiator Springs with his new friends, having lost interest in the race. Still, Doc alerts the media of Lightning's location, leading them and Mack to descend on the town and force Lightning to leave. Doc immediately regrets his actions after seeing the residents turn against him for making Lightning leave. At the race, Lightning initially struggles but is buoyed by the sudden arrival of his friends from Radiator Springs, who come to his aid in the pit. With Doc now acting as his crew chief, Lightning stages a remarkable comeback and takes the lead. On the final lap, as Lightning closes in towards the Finish Line, Chick employs a PIT maneuver that intentionally wrecks The King, rendering him unable to continue. Fearing that The King's career may end as Doc's did, Lightning halts just before the finish line and pushes The King across, allowing Chick to win the Piston Cup while ensuring The King's safe finish.
The crowd and media furiously condemn Chick's Piston Cup victory while praising Lightning's integrity and sportsmanship. Although offered a Dinoco sponsorship, Lightning politely declines and chooses to be with his current sponsor, Rust-eze Bumper Ointment, out of newfound respect and loyalty for them. Returning to Radiator Springs, he reunites with Sally, Mater, and the other cars and declares his intention to establish his racing headquarters there and revitalize the town, while also training under Doc's mentorship.
Production[]
Development[]
The development of Cars began in 1998, when Pixar finished production of A Bug's Life. At that time, Jorgen Klubien began writing a new script called The Yellow Car, which was about an electric car living in a gas-guzzling world inspired by The Ugly Duckling, an idea triggered by the poor reception his fellow countrymen gave the Mini-El car. Some of the original drawings and characters were developed in 1998 and the producers agreed that Cars could be the next Pixar film after A Bug's Life and be released in early 1999, particularly around June 4. However, the idea was scrapped in favor of Toy Story 2. Later, production resumed with major script changes, like giving Mater, Doc and a few other characters bigger parts.
John Lasseter said that inspiration for the film's story came after he took a cross-country road trip with his wife and five sons in 2000. When he returned to the studio after vacation, he contacted Michael Wallis, a Route 66 historian. Wallis then led eleven Pixar animators in rented white Cadillacs on two different road trips across the route to research the film. In 2001, the film's working title was Route 66 (after U.S. Route 66), but the title was changed to Cars in order to avoid confusion with the 1960s television series of the same name. In addition, Lightning McQueen's racing number was originally going to be 57 (a reference to 1957, Lasseter's birth year), but was changed to 95 (a reference to 1995, the year Pixar's first feature film Toy Story was released).
In 2006, Lasseter spoke about the inspiration for the film, saying: "I have always loved cars. In one vein, I have Disney blood, and in the other, there's motor oil. The notion of combining these two great passions in my life—cars and animation—was irresistible. When Joe (Ranft) and I first started talking about this film in 1998, we knew we wanted to do something with cars as characters. Around that same time, we watched a documentary called 'Divided Highways,' which dealt with the interstate highway and how it affected the small towns along the way. We were so moved by it and began thinking about what it must have been like in these small towns that got bypassed. That's when we started really researching Route 66, but we still hadn't quite figured out what the story for the film was going to be. I used to travel that highway with my family as a child when we visited our family in St. Louis."
Years later in 2013, Klubien said the film was both his best and most bitter experience because he was fired before it premiered and because he feels Lasseter wrote him out of the story of how the film got made.
Animation[]
For the cars themselves, Lasseter also visited the design studios of the Big Three Detroit automakers, particularly J Mays of Ford Motor Company. Lasseter learned how real cars were designed.
In 2006, Lasseter spoke about how they worked hard to make the animation believable, saying: "It took many months of trial and error, and practicing test animation, to figure out how each car moves and how their world works. Our supervising animators, Doug Sweetland and Scott Clark, and the directing animators, Bobby Podesta and James Ford Murphy, did an amazing job working with the animation team to determine the unique movements for each character based on its age and the type of car it was. Some cars are like sports cars and they're much tighter in their suspension. Others are older '50s cars that are a lot looser and have more bounce to them. We wanted to get that authenticity in there but also to make sure each car had a unique personality. We also wanted each animator to be able to put some of themself in the character and give it their own spin. Every day in dailies, it was so much fun because we would see things that we had never seen in our lives. The world of cars came alive in a believable and unexpected way."
Unlike most anthropomorphic cars, the eyes of the cars in this film were placed on the windshield (which resembles the Tonka Talking Trucks, 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 feels 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." This decision was facetiously criticized by automotive blog Jalopnik.
In 2006, the supervising animator of the film, Scott Clark, spoke about the challenges of animating car characters, saying: "Getting a full range of performance and emotion from these characters and making them still seem like cars was a tough assignment, but that's what animation does best. You use your imagination, and you make the movements and gestures fit with the design. Our car characters may not have arms and legs, but we can lean the tires in or out to suggest hands opening up or closing in. We can use steering to point a certain direction. We also designed a special eyelid and an eyebrow for the windshield that lets us communicate an expressiveness that cars don't have." Doug Sweetland, who also served as supervising animator, also spoke about the challenges, saying: "It took a different kind of animator to really be able to interpret the Cars models, than it did to interpret something like The Incredibles models. With The Incredibles, the animator could get reference for the characters by shooting himself and watching the footage. But with Cars, it departs completely from any reference. Yes they're cars, but no car can do what our characters do. It's pure fantasy. It took a lot of trial and error to get them to look right."
Lasseter also explained that the film started with pencil and paper designs, saying: "Truth to materials. Starting with pencil-and-paper designs from production designer Bob Pauley, and continuing through the modeling, articulation, and shading of the characters, and finally into animation, the production team worked hard to have the car characters remain true to their origins." Character department manager Jay Ward also explained how they wanted the cars to look as realistic as possible, saying: "John didn't want the cars to seem clay-like or mushy. He insisted on truth to materials. This was a huge thing for him. He told us that steel needs to feel like steel. Glass should feel like glass. These cars need to feel heavy. They weigh three or four thousand pounds. When they move around, they need to have that feel. They shouldn't appear light or overly bouncy to the point where the audience might see them as rubber toys." According to directing animator James Ford Murphy, "Originally, the car models were built so they could basically do anything. John kept reminding us that these characters are made of metal and they weigh several thousand pounds. They can't stretch. He showed us examples of very loose animation to illustrate what not to do."
Character shading supervisor on the film Thomas Jordan explained that chrome and car paint were the main challenges on the film, saying: "Chrome and car paint were our two main challenges on this film. We started out by learning as much as we could. At the local body shop, we watched them paint a car, and we saw the way they mixed the paint and applied the various coats. We tried to dissect what goes into the real paint and recreated it in the computer. We figured out that we needed a base paint, which is where the color comes from, and the clearcoat, which provides the reflection. We were then able to add in things like metallic flake to give it a glittery sparkle, a pearlescent quality that might change color depending on the angle, and even a layer of pin-striping for characters like Ramone." Supervising technical director on the film Eben Ostby explained that the biggest challenge for the technical team was creating the metallic and painted surfaces of the car characters, and the reflections that those surfaces generate, saying: "Given that the stars of our film are made of metal, John had a real desire to see realistic reflections, and more beautiful lighting than we've seen in any of our previous films. In the past, we've mostly used environment maps and other matte-based technology to cheat reflections, but for Cars we added a ray-tracing capability to our existing Renderman program to raise the bar for Pixar."
Rendering lead Jessica McMackin spoke about the use of ray tracing on the film, saying: "In addition to creating accurate reflections, we used ray tracing to achieve other effects. We were able to use this approach to create accurate shadows, like when there are multiple light sources and you want to get a feathering of shadows at the edges. Or occlusion, which is the absence of ambient light between two surfaces, like a crease in a shirt. A fourth use is irradiance. An example of this would be if you had a piece of red paper and held it up to a white wall, the light would be colored by the paper and cast a red glow on the wall." Character supervisor Tim Milliron explained that the film uses a ground–locking system that kept the cars firmly planted on the road, saying: "The ground-locking system is one of the things I'm most proud of on this film. In the past, characters have never known about their environment in any way. A simulation pass was required if you wanted to make something like that happen. On Cars, this system is built into the models themselves, and as you move the car around, the vehicle sticks to the ground. It was one of those things that we do at Pixar where we knew going in that it had to be done, but we had no idea how to do it."
Technical director Lisa Forsell explained that to enhance the richness and beauty of the desert landscapes surrounding Radiator Springs, the filmmakers created a department responsible for matte paintings and sky flats, saying: "Digital matte paintings are a way to get a lot of visual complexity without necessarily having to build complex geometry, and write complex shaders. We spent a lot time working on the clouds and their different formations. They tend to be on several layers and they move relative to each other. The clouds do in fact have some character and personality. The notion was that just as people see themselves in the clouds, cars see various car-shaped clouds. It's subtle, but there are definitely some that are shaped like a sedan. And if you look closely, you'll see some that look like tire treads. The fact that so much attention is put on the skies speaks to the visual level of the film. Is there a story point? Not really. There is no pixel on the screen that does not have an extraordinary level of scrutiny and care applied to it. There is nothing that is just throw-away."
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 similar to those used in the design of real-world automobiles.
Release[]
Cars was originally going to be released on November 4, 2005, but on December 7, 2004, its release date was moved to 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 Pixar's chief executive 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.
Home media[]
Cars was released on DVD, in wide- and full-screen editions, on November 7, 2006, in the United States and Canada. This DVD was also released on October 25, 2006, in Australia and New Zealand and on November 27, 2006, in the United Kingdom. The release includes the DVD-exclusive short film Mater and the Ghostlight and the film's theatrical short One Man Band as well as a 16-minute-long documentary about the film entitled Inspiration for Cars, which features director John Lasseter. This THX certified release also features an Easter egg in the main menu, which is a 45-second clip showing a Cars version of Boundin'. A VHS was released on February 19, 2007, to members of Disney's home video club.
According to the Walt Disney Company, five million copies of the DVD were sold the first two days it was available. The first week, it sold 6,250,856 units and 15,370,791 in total ($246,198,859). Unlike previous Pixar DVD releases, there is no two-disc special edition, and no plans to release one in the future. According to Sara Maher, DVD Production Manager at Pixar, John Lasseter and Pixar were preoccupied with productions like Ratatouille.
In the US and Canada, there were bonus discs available with the purchase of the film at Wal-Mart and at Target. The former featured a Geared-Up Bonus DVD Disc that focused on the music of the film, including the music video to "Life Is A Highway", The Making of "Life Is A Highway", Cars: The Making of the Music, and Under The Hood, a special that originally aired on the ABC Family cable channel. The latter's bonus was a Rev'd Up DVD Disc that featured material mostly already released as part of the official Cars podcast and focused on the inspiration and production of the movie.
Cars was also released on Blu-ray Disc on November 6, 2007, one year after the DVD release. It was the first Pixar film to be released on Blu-ray (alongside Ratatouille and Pixar Short Films Collection, Volume 1), and was re-released as a Blu-ray Disc and DVD combo pack and DVD only edition in April 2011. The film was released for the first time in 3D on October 29, 2013, as part of Cars: Ultimate Collector's Edition, which included the releases on Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and DVD. In 2019, Cars was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.
Trivia[]
- This was Paul Newman's last American feature film before his death of lung cancer in 2008. It turned out to be the highest-grossing movie of his career. George Carlin died of heart failure three months earlier. This was the highest-grossing film of his career as well.
- The final Pixar film to be released on VHS, and the first to be released on Blu-ray.
- Luigi's license plate reads 445-108, which is the latitude and longitude for the main Ferrari factory in Modena, Italy.
- The production wanted to use a little-known version of the song "Route 66" by Chuck Berry, which had appeared on the B-side of one of his singles. They approached Berry's record company, who didn't know anything about such a version. After they trawled through their record vaults, they realized that Pixar was right.
- The Doc Hudson character is based on real-life NASCAR pioneer Herb Thomas, who drove Hudson Hornets to Grand National championships in 1951 and 1953. He was beaten out for the title in 1954 by Lee Petty, father of Richard Petty ("The King"). Crashes in 1955 and 1956 effectively ended Thomas' career.
- Lightning McQueen, being a first-year "Piston Cup" racer, displays the traditional yellow "rookie stripe" on his rear bumper.
- Instead of making the cars' headlights the eyes, as is done in most cartoons, the Pixar animators decided to put the eyes up on the windshield, because that made the characters more expressive.
- Every now and then, Lightning McQueen's tongue pops out when he's thinking about something. This is a characteristic of writer and director John Lasseter, which his animators gleefully incorporated into the film.
- The last Pixar film to use THX
References or Mentions in CHACE! Media[]
- WALL·E (2008): As he is filling his cooler with the bobblehead dog and bra, a bottle of Leak Less can be seen in the garbage.
- Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015): The way the Farmer's trailer hits the train tracks is similar to what Lightning McQueen does when he believes a Peterbilt is Mack
References from CHACE! Media[]
TBD
Gallery[]
Cars (film)/Gallery
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