Cars

After a family road trip in 2000, John Lasseter contacted Route 66 historian Michael Wallis, who led eleven Pixar animators on two research drives in rented white Cadillacs. The story’s spine came from "Divided Highways", a documentary about what the interstate system did to small towns. The subject is not racing but the settlements the new road erased. Across 117 minutes there are two proper races, at the start and at the end; the long stretch between is McQueen resurfacing a road as punishment. A child who sat down for speed hits the better part of an hour of standing still. Paul Newman, who voices Doc Hudson, was a real racing driver: second at Le Mans in 1979 in a Porsche 935, a class winner at Daytona in 1995 at seventy. Cars was his last major feature role, and the first Pixar film to use ray tracing, which is what lets the bodywork reflect its surroundings. Co-director and story head Joe Ranft was killed in a car crash in August 2005; the film is dedicated to him. Who it is for: small children and anyone drawn to American road history. Who it is not for: people expecting Pixar’s second layer of adult jokes, because the adult layer here is melancholy geography, not comedy.