Family Home Theater

Grade: B/B+
Entire family: Yes
2017, 103 min., Color
Animation
Disney
Rated G
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Featured audio: DTS-HDMA 7.1
Bonus features: B+
Includes: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD
Trailer
Amazon link

It’s not all about the movies these days. Somebody at Disney must have calculated that a Cars film released roughly every five years should be enough to keep the characters alive for the public and maintain healthy sales of Cars-related merchandise. And for the first 15 minutes or so Cars 3 seems like a dash-for-the-cash affair. Then Disney does what they do best: they get viewers emotionally involved with the characters.

The animation, of course, is wonderful—even more impressive than what we saw in the first two films, with backgrounds rendered so realistically they could pass for photos. But in the early going this 2017 follow-up to Cars (2006) and Cars 2 (2011) feels like just another version of what we’ve seen before. In the first Cars, audiences were introduced to Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a hot-shot race car who found himself stranded in podunk Radiator Springs, where his attitude got a major adjustment and he learned that family and friends are just as important as wins. The second film was a love-it or hate-it affair—a spoof of spy films that found Lightning McQueen and his sidekick Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) going to Europe to compete in a World Grand Prix and getting involved in assassinations and international espionage. Cars dying? That’s not exactly what families signed up for.

With Cars 3 the franchise circles back to what appealed to viewers in the first place—only this time it’s like Rocky, with McQueen training for a comeback and aiming to beat a new young hot-shot named Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), who hit the circuit just as McQueen hit a wall so hard that everyone in racing pronounced him down for the count.

McQueen finds himself being “virtually” trained by Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), whose own dream of becoming a race car was shattered by a glass ceiling in the business, where she was put down by the male racers. Her methods are unconventional and somehow smack of tofu-and-Birkenstocks aerobics, which provides a good deal of the comedy. But writers Brian Fee (who was a storyboard artist for Wall-E, Ratatouille, and Cars) and Ben Queen (Cars 2, TV’s Powerless) wisely chose to take the characters on the road, where they can learn about themselves and each other and viewers can start to care more than if everyone just kept driving in circles or staying in a Gold’s Gym for cars.

This is Fee’s directorial debut, and it’s a solid one. Take away those first overly familiar 20 minutes and you’ve got Rocky for cars, a formula that he both follows and puts in his rear-view mirror. In the process, families get the kind of Cars they seem to prefer.

One highlight this outing is Disney’s spot-on rendition of a demolition derby and the raucous atmosphere and mud-spinning chaos of the figure-eight race. Here’s where we meet the movie’s most memorable character: Miss Fritter (Lea DeLaria), a converted school bus that now spouts fire and lays waste to every car in her path, and does so with jovial menace. One of the bonus features on this Blu-ray combo pack is a mini-movie featuring Miss Fritter, but there’s also a nifty primer on demolition derby and the rules of figure-eight, and “how Pixar puts the crazy in the Thunder Hollow Crazy 8 race.” There’s a nice bundle of bonus features here, but of course it’s the film that families care most about. And if you liked this original Cars, you’ll like this as well.

Grade: C+/B-
Entire family: Yes
1991, 77 min., Color
Animation/Live-action
Olive Films
Rated G
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 widescreen
Featured audio: DTS-HDMA 2.0 Stereo
Bonus features: n/a
Trailer
Amazon link

Don Bluth forever will be known as a talented artist who left Disney to start an animation company that produced The Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and The Land Before Time in the ‘80s under his direction. But the studio’s titles in the first half of the ‘90s struggled to connect with viewers, and Rock-a-Doodle (1991), Thumbelina (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994), and The Pebble and the Penguin (1994) all had disappointing box-office returns.

The problem with Rock-a-Doodle, as is so often the case with non-Disney animated features, is the concept itself—and that includes a live-action “frame” that seems gratuitous, even clunky. Bluth had been the animation supervisor on Disney’s Pete’s Dragon and obviously wanted to showcase his talents. But The Princess Bride-style frame about a boy reading a book doesn’t work because it’s introduced a little too late in the film and the whole parallel of the boy’s parents fighting a flood while he’s transformed into a cat who tries to bring a rooster back from the city to “save” the farm (and the parents’ farm) seems strained. Plus, the live-action simply doesn’t hold up as well as the animation.

As for the rest of the premise, it certainly had promise, as a rollicking opening sequence and song prove. The rooster Chanticleer (Glen Campbell) is the strutting king of the barnyard whose singing wakes up the sun every day. That story and opening musical number have all the charm that fables usually provide, and had Bluth stayed with a simpler fabulistic fabric he might have had something. Instead, he offers a villain whose motives and actions are just a little fuzzy.

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