You must be one of the luckiest guys in the world

I thought the sequel was better but it doesn’t have the rewatchability of the original

More than any of that, though, it was at the world premiere that a little light bulb went off inside my head. I saw John Lasseter there… got to see him appreciate and celebrate sharing with the world something he had worked on for the very first time. It clicked in my 12-year-old brain that people got paid to make movies and loved their jobs. It inspired me: not to make movies necessarily, but to love whatever work I pursued. After that event I started writing because I felt that I had to share what I felt with words. So, long story short, Cars is special to me personally. It’s hard for me to view it objectively!

You should also write an article about the mater toons. They arent movies but they are funny.

You make a lot of good points, Andrew. I do think that Cars was a huge passion project for Lasseter, and passion projects do have a tendency to run amok. However, I keep coming back to the fact that I love Cars. I think a lot of that love comes back to the fact that I share Lasseter’s passion for cars and car culture (as I say in the article).

I have much more mixed feelings about Cars 2. I don’t want to go too much into that (since I’m writing the article for that one, too), but it does feel a little like a cash grab. One of the things I do like about the movie, though, is how well it depicts the foreign racing circuit, like F1 and such. Maybe that’s the passion Lasseter was talking about.

I think you’re pretty spot on – it does feel skewed younger, and I can feel confident it was a passion project for Lasseter that just happened to sell a crap ton of merchandise – Lasseter claims the sequel also came from his passion, and, I dunno, in a way it probably did – YouTube critic Mr. Enter who did a full review on it said it may have simply been a result of blind passion without good judgment on Lasseter’s part, and that might be true – although the easier assumption is to say it was made to sell more toys (or at least that’s probably how it got greenlit).

I share many of the feelings you’ve expressed about this movie, the weirdness of the car-world being at the top. In the end, I think we shouldn’t think about this one too hard.

The impression I have with this film is Pixar trying to reach a younger audience. I don’t think they actually intended that, but that’s the feeling I get with this movie. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a good movie (personally, I enjoyed it, certainly not on the same level as I enjoyed other Pixar movies, but there are great characters and the story is fun and touching). Still, I can’t help but sense a certain tone of juvenile when I watch this movie.

I don’t think it was made for merchandise (maybe Cars 2 hahahaha), I think the team behind Cars might have been just as surprised as Disney was with Frozen merchandise (I mean, what in the world was that?!). Who could know McQueen would become such an iconic character among kids? I think the team behin Cars tried their best with the concept and succeeded in an unexpected way. But that’s only me speculating 🙂

But I can’t deny that it has a heart to it, which is why it still can rub me the wrong way when I read it being called “trash” or “terrible”. But when I watched it again as part of my Pixar marathon in prep for Monsters University 2 years ago, I kind of thought “… yeah, I admire some things, but overall don’t need to watch it again”. I remember seeing it in theaters at 13, twice actually with two different groups, and it really was lacking that extra oomph I got from Pixar’s previous films. But I have a hard time really considering it “bad”, because there at least felt like there were some honest intentions behind it (despite the possible cynical angle of saying it was made for merchandise). I dunno, for me it falls right down the middle, not terrible or great.