Cars

Usually I would say Pixar could do no wrong, but then I'd have to ignore Cars. A terrible piece of entertainment, the movie proves that within Pixar movies lays a formula that has been repeated through out all their releases and unless you add a large amount of imagination and wit, you are doomed to a 1930s rolling out of a product that will make money but not challenge your bounds. The good thing is that Cars is the only mistake by Pixar so far. Nothing about the story or characters are fresh or interesting. What is new about the movie is the realism of the animation. Where animation was a language and simplifcation of our world to its own aesthetics and beauty, Cars tries to get animation to reflect the complexities of details in our life. John Lasseter promoted the new computer effects used in the movie. He didn't do good. The effects, meant to enthrall, just overload on the visuals. The fact the story involves many high speed chases with large amounts of details and objects make the wonderfully precise animation all that more worse. Brad Bird, in all of his efforts pre and post-Cars, still simplifies the animated world. He details the objects meant to catch our attention in a scene and simplifies the rest of the scene. He takes advantage of new and excellent computer animation but doesn't over step basic principles of animation aesthetics. Cars has absolutely no sense of these aesthetics. Our only salvation is that 3/4 of the story is set in a remote desert town, but if it was a city with lights and objects everywhere, there is little doubt Lasseter wouldn't have tried to capture it all.