Death and toilets, Pixar style

Aside from the occasional break to stay in hotel rooms and nick shit, Your Correspondent spends much of his time on Planet Parenthood. As such he watches a lot of Disney. Usually unwillingly, given they're fascist culture-vulture bastards, but they're pretty hard to avoid even if you want to - much like trying to dodge Woolies or Coles over their pokie prickery in the Australian market.

Which brings us to Cars 2, which Monster v1.0 was kind enough to take me to this morning. I saw the first Pixar Cars film a couple of years ago - and thanks to the magic of DVD technology, have seen it approximately eleventy billion times since - and thought it was, in a word, a'ight. Nicely woven story, into which was planted a fairly decent parody-tribute of NASCAR, although the treacle-laden small-town-renewal subplot was a bit on the gagworthy side, particularly if your experience is of towns like Bangalow in northern NSW who were effectively saved rather than destroyed by being bypassed by highways. But, a decent kids' flick. Followed up by my personal pick of all of Pixar's output, the short-form cartoons of Mater's Tall Tales, where the Pixar kids were allowed to go just a little bit silly with the characters they'd worked up. It's worth a look, if you're mired on Planet Parenthood on a wet weekend with no immediate chance of rescue. Anyhoo, suffice to say, with a Monster of 4 1/2 years marauding around the place in full Lightning McQueen regalia, the upcoming release of Cars 2 was on the calendar a long way in advance.

So what was it like? In a word... a'ight. Having run the font dry of big-city-vs-small-town narrative, Team Pixar basically decided to chuck a stylistic U'ey and make a Bond genre parody-tribute, based around a nebulous World Grand Prix matchrace series. And it does the job. With one, minor, reservation. Surprisingly, it's actually pretty violent for a Disney cartoon. Guns, explosions, smash-up brawls, death and toilets, the lot. Yes, it fits the genre, and yes, cartoons have been violent since the medium existed - Bugs and Elmer, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Tom and Jerry - but the point of cartoon violence is that no matter who does what to whom, everyone shakes it off and bounces back, rather than being killed to death - the key disconnect parodied by Itchy and Scratchy on the Simpsons. Also, those sorts of cartoons are generally not found on the family-friendly corporate label of Uncle Walt - either back in the day, or now on Disney Playhouse or the like. Put it this way - the number of torture-execution scenes I can recall from Special Agent Oso can be counted on the fingers of one hand of an exceedingly careless machine lathe operator. (Handy Manny after a few too many Tecates perhaps.) Monster v1.0 was fine with it, largely because it went over his head, but if you're the owner-operator of slightly older, more aware or more sensitive kids, you might have a few awkward questions to field re mortality, even if it's just of cartoon characters. (Kinda inevitably they offed the character of Doc Hudson between movies, but that was more due to the real-life-ejecting-from-twig of voice actor and racing god Paul Newman.)

All that pales into insignificance when faced with the real travesty of this film, which is casting V8 Supercar also-ran Frosty Winterbottom as one of the 'international stars', on a par with F1's Lewis Hamilton and NASCAR's Jeff Gordon. What. The. Very. Fuck. Clearly, a comedy name and an echoingly empty trophy cabinet are enough to have you considered alongside the biggest and brightest in motorsport. That or he had more spare time available than other V8 Supercar drivers, presumably on account of not having to nip off to trophy presentations all the time. It's odd, because Pixar seemed to put a lot of thought into their international stars. Lewis Hamilton's character car, for instance, was a McLaren. And black. See what they did there? It's very subtle.


Still, it's watchable. Which is just as well. As anyone on Planet Parenthood knows, thanks to the magic of DVD technology, I'll be seeing it again approximately eleventy billion times hence, so will have ample opportunity to reassess.

Or I might just hide Mater's Tall Tales in the DVD case.

The Doctor is OUT.