Fix This Flat
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Fix This Flat Animation is great, but don't forget plot and characters. BY JOHN PODHORETZ "When a director dies," the pioneering cinematogra-pher John Grier-son once said, "he becomes a...
...And that's because it appears Lasseter fell in love with the way it looked and forgot that he needed to tell a story that would move people...
...Its director is John Lasseter, the founder and chief executive of Pixar and the director of its first great movies, Toy Story and Toy Story 2. The extraordinary thing about Lasseter's earlier work was the obsessive focus on storytelling and character development...
...He learns to love and care about people, especially a cute little Porsche...
...Cars is the first bad Pixar movie...
...Lasseter would have known in his earlier days that he needed to emphasize character and story above all else, just as he would have known that the movie could have been trimmed by 20 minutes with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever...
...After a traffic accident, a crusty judge orders him to spend a week fixing the place up (a rather hackneyed plot device stolen shamelessly from the Michael J. Fox movie Doc Hollywood...
...He was referring to a problem that has afflicted film directors almost from the moment of the medium's birth...
...Even though Pixar was bringing an innovative animation technique to full-bodied life in these films, Lasseter never called on his viewers to ooh and aah at the amazing look of the images emerging John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic, and the author, most recently, of Can She Be Stopped...
...Whatever the reason, Cars is a minor fiasco...
...In Toy Story, Lasseter lavished attention even on the most minor characters and managed to create indelible impressions in a short period of time: a neurotic dinosaur, an acerbic Mr...
...And neither is Cars, because its characters are poorly conceived and its story is uninvolving...
...It appears that, even in the world of computer animation, when no actual cinematography is taking place, it's still the case that when a director dies, he becomes a cinematographer...
...But all too often, directors become obsessed with the technical aspects of moviemaking, especially with the look of the film...
...And wouldn't you know it...
...It's possible that the tragic loss of his codirector, Joe Ranft, in a car crash last year robbed Lasseter of crucial creative advice he needed...
...The play of light and shadow, the subtle way in which the shiny race car gets more and more grimy as the movie goes on, and the evocation of a multivehicle crash are technically mind-boggling...
...It has a satisfying final 15 minutes, but it's very hard to sit through the 91 that precede it...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ "When a director dies," the pioneering cinematogra-pher John Grier-son once said, "he becomes a cine-matographer...
...Lasseter couldn't, or wouldn't, get rid of anything pretty...
...In Cars, all we get are the most obvious cliches: a Hispanic low-rider, a redneck tow truck, a hippie Volkswagen van, a martial Jeep...
...And it's a great mystery why Las-seter would hang his entire tale on a character as unappealing as Lightning McQueen, who doesn't have a single endearing quality and then makes a sudden and weird transformation into a good guy, out of our view, during a sleepless night we don't get to watch...
...They presume we will love them...
...The protagonist is a cocky race car named Lightning McQueen, who is trying to win the prestigious Piston Cup...
...from his wondrous computers...
...Grierson was saying that any director who is more interested in the composition of a frame of film than in the story has lost his way...
...But they aren't in the least interesting...
...He needs to be taken down a few pegs, and that happens when he finds himself marooned in a small town called Radiator Springs...
...He's selfish, thinks he knows everything, and is a snob...
...What mattered—in Lasseter's two films and in the five amazing Pixar movies that followed them—was the tale itself, told with uncommon wit, speed, and emotional depth...
...They are more interested in making sure that the dents on the tow truck are all in the right place...
...A director's job is, above all, to be the storyteller of a movie, to make the plot and characters come alive...
...It's also possible that he was distracted beyond salvation by the Disney-Pixar soap opera that took up so much space in the business sections of the newspaper over these past few years...
...The movie's cast of talking cars is awe-inspiring, as are the settings in which they move: Utah's Monument Valley and the NASCAR racetracks where the film begins and climaxes...
...And since he is the creative boss at Pixar—and now that Disney has acquired Pixar, of all Disney animation—nobody was able to set him straight...
...Las-seter and his crew do nothing but present us with them...
...That's exactly the problem with Cars, the latest animated film released by Pixar...
...Potato Head, an obsequious slinky dog...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 39
