Larry Niven & Cars

I've been reading Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away. Some goofy imagery and awkward dialogue, but the true ancestor of our film. This is one in which the world is more interesting than the book. We can ask this question of our film: if the world is more interesting than the film, is there still reason for the film to exist?

I've also been watching Cars with Sean. It's surprisingly sucky. It screens as though John Lasseter was concerned about the increasingly baroque quality of the Pixar films and wanted to strip everything down to the basics. But all this does is reveal the film's roughly-constructed mechanics. This is one of those films where the hero speaks his motivations and the filmmakers use clunky devices to keep the narrative rolling (characterization via interview? building a road? kicking a can into a garage?). To me one quality of a bad film is when I can start to hear the filmmaker's voices instead of the voice of the film. You can practically hear Lasseter thinking, "we've got to keep him stuck in the small town... but how? Now what is magic moment where we fall in love with this place?" It's the same reason I can't watch Adam Sandler films. I always feel like I'm part of a scheme to turn him into a romantic lead. In Cars, I never felt they resolved the awkwardness of using cars as characters and the car-thropomorphizing of life (vw bugs as bugs?). Then again they have 244 million reasons *not* to care what I think.