Cars 2: bigger isn’t always better
Pixar’s 2011 sequel swapped the quiet charm of Radiator Springs for a globe-trotting spy story, and became the studio’s most divisive film in the process.
By 2011, Pixar had built a reputation that no other animation studio could match. Across the previous decade it had released a run of films that critics treated almost as events, and even its less celebrated features were regarded as solid. Cars 2 broke that streak. It was the first Pixar feature to draw a broadly negative critical consensus, and for years afterwards it was the film people cited when arguing that the studio had become too interested in sequels.
From a small town to the world
The first Cars, released in 2006, was a gentle film at heart. It was about a hot-shot racing car, Lightning McQueen, learning humility in a forgotten town on Route 66, and it carried a clear affection for slower ways of living. Cars 2, directed by John Lasseter with Brad Lewis as co-director, moved in almost the opposite direction. McQueen enters a World Grand Prix with stops in Japan, Italy and Britain, and his tow-truck friend Mater is mistaken for an American secret agent by British operatives, among them Finn McMissile, voiced by Michael Caine.
The result is a spy comedy with racing in the background. It has gadgets, chases, a plot about alternative fuel and a villainous conspiracy, all built around a character who in the first film had been comic relief. Doc Hudson, the mentor figure voiced in the original by Paul Newman, who died in 2008, is absent, and with him much of the first film’s emotional weight.
Why critics were divided
- Mater as lead. A sidekick who works in small doses can wear thin over a full feature, and many reviewers felt that was the case here.
- Genre over feeling. Pixar’s strongest films had paired spectacle with a clear emotional core. Cars 2 offered plenty of spectacle and a friendship story that felt thinner.
- Commercial suspicion. Cars was already a merchandising phenomenon, and some critics read the sequel’s expansion of the world, with new characters in every location, as driven by that success.
Not everyone disliked it. The film’s design is lavish, its international settings are crowded with visual jokes, and younger viewers, its main audience, generally enjoyed the spy antics. It also did well commercially. But it remains the clearest example of a Pixar film that did more without meaning more.
How it looks now
Pixar seemed to acknowledge the lesson with Cars 3 in 2017, which went back to racing and gave McQueen a story about ageing and mentorship that echoed the first film. Seen with that in mind, Cars 2 looks like a detour: energetic, expensive and fun in places, but proof that a bigger canvas does not automatically make a better picture.
Movies · Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland · Men in Black 3 revisited