The second trailer for "Cars 2"... looks like sub-Dreamworks pablum. As that also handily sums up the first one, I'm not sure why the fact that it's so crummy-looking is being treated as a news-item everywhere else in the blogosphere...
I mean, didn't we all kind of "accept and deal" with this already? "Cars" is the very bottom of the Pixar barrel artistically, but as a merchandising-franchise it's their biggest cash-cow. I could be wrong, but wasn't it a "big deal" awhile back that the Cars-brand had displaced Hotwheels as "the" toy-car line? So... "everything else" is the 'real' Pixar stuff, and "Cars" is the crap they have to make to PAY for the 'real' stuff. I thought we'd been through this already...
Thing is, I kinda feel like there's TWO angles at play here, but only one of them is "open" about itself. On the one hand, dedicated film-geek Pixar afficionados tend to dislike "Cars" because it's such a step down from the rest of the lineup - that's the "open" one.
On the other hand... "Cars" is ALSO the most "different" Pixar movie in terms of it's vibe and frame of reference: The other movies are about monsters, action-figures, superheroes, lost-worlds, robots... stuff film-geeks (generally) love. "Cars," on the other hand, is "about" rural small-town values, Middle-American normalcy and NASCAR culture; all things that "geek culture" to a large-degree actively abhors. Other Pixar movies drop references to Harryhausen and Kurosawa, "Cars" has Larry the Cable Guy as it's co-lead. We (geeks) tend to see Pixar as an "US" outfit, but "Cars" is a "THEM" movie - and that kinda pisses us off, right?
Am I nuts, or is that just a teensy bit of the story here? Not so much, "this is why people think 'Cars' sucked - because it DOES suck - but maybe "this is why people CARE that "Cars" sucks."
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