Cars: Critic Reviews

A wonderfully imaginative film, filled with just the right amount of nostalgia and sentimentality to win over audiences of all ages.

A work of American art as classic as it is modern.

... both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney ...

Smooth, but bland and forgettable.

The animation is stunningly rendered. But the story is always the critical element in Pixar movies, and Cars' story is heartfelt with a clear and unabashed moral.

It's the latest concoction from the geniuses at Pixar, probably the most inventive of the Computer Generated Imagery shop -- and the film's great fun, if well under the level of the first Toy Story.

The short answer is: Pixar does it again.

What ultimately redeems Cars from turning out a total lemon is its soul. Lasseter loves these animated inanimate objects as though they were kin, and it shows in every beautifully rendered frame.

It achieves the near impossible, turning cars, trucks, tractors and farm harvesters into cute Disney characters whose fates you'll care about.

It thunders ahead with breezy abandon, scoring big grins on its way.

No other outfit can match Pixar's knack for plucking heartstrings without tearing them off the frets.

Cars idles at times. And it's not until its final laps that the movie gains the emotional traction we've come to expect from the Toy Story and Nemo crews.

Like the Toy Story films, Cars is a state-of-the-computer-art plea on behalf of outmoded, wholesome fifties technology, with a dash of Zen by way of George Lucas.

Along came the interstate, apparently, and ruined everything. Just like that darned Internet, I guess, or that superhighway stuff, or those dumb movies they make with computers nowadays.

It tells a bright and cheery story, and then has a little something profound lurking around the edges. In this case, it's a sense of loss.

While it's a technically perfect movie, its tone is too manic, its characters too jaded and, in the end, its story too empty to stand up to expectations.

At 116 minutes, it's a test not of speed but endurance.

Pixar finally rolled out a clunker.

It takes everything that's made Pixar shorthand for animation excellence -- strong characters, tight pacing, spot-on voice casting, a warm sense of humor and visuals that are pure, pixilated bliss -- and carries them to the next stage.

It's touching, it's funny, it offers cautions about the modern pace of life, and it depends on a sense of rural Americana for its soul.

The truest measure of the movie is that eventually we forget we're watching a bunch of vehicles with faces and start to think of them as individual characters. It's quite an accomplishment, and perhaps one only possible by Pixar.

Despite representing another impressive technical achievement, it's the least visually interesting of the computer-animation boutique's movies, and -- in an ironic twist for a story about auto racing -- drifts slowly through its semi-arid midsection.

Cars somewhat self-indulgently runs nearly two hours -- but overall, it's well worth the trip.

It's beautiful to look at. The talking cars feel more alive than talking cars should.

Cars made me want to hop in my jalopy and to head out to Route 66, bypassing the boring interstate highways that made the Mother Road redundant.