CARS' Automania
I wrote about Disney/Buena Vista's CARS for the Boston Phoenix.
Despite the sleek beauty of the Pixar animation, this G-rated family entertainment hits the back-breaking/migraine- or tantrum-inducing wall of pain around the 70 minute mark, with two or three unfunny, protracted automania sequences in the desert.
When did kid and family movies start getting so painfully long?
Disney's classic animated films ran scarcely more than an hour: BAMBI (1942) had a running time of seventy minutes; DUMBO (1941) was 64 minutes. For many kids of pre-school, pre-literate age, these are the first movies we saw in a movie theatre.
TOY STORY (1995) ran a kid-friendly 81 minutes: short enough to dazzle and enchant the four- to six-year-olds who'd been taken to see it without sending them into pre-naptime meltdowns. The most recent WALLACE AND GROMIT movie clocked in around the 90 minute mark, too. CARS, with the pre-feature short "One Man Band," is close to two hours long.
Did Disney not think to market-test Cars before a full house of children fueled up on jumbo popcarn and extra-large sodas? Or did someone say, "Let's keep the sucky "vehicle courtship/flashback/endless drive through the desert"; the kids will be bored, or they'll be running up and down the aisles, or they'll be demanding to be taken to the bathroom for the fifth time.
Will you see this movie if you don't have a kid to accompany you? My six-year-old nephew, who loved EIGHT BELOW and DUMA, is psyched for opening day, but I'm bracing myself for the second viewing.
Another nephew, who's three, is clamoring for Cars. But he's never been to a movie theatre. Right now he's happily obsessed with Toy Story 2 (not Toy Story). For him, it's as though cinema's first chapter has been written not by Disney, but by Pixar. Yet he experiences the DVD of Toy Story 2 not as continuous narrative but as selected, favorite scenes and songs watched over and over.
Randy Newman, you have a lot to answer for.