‘Cars 3’ takes the high road adding a strong Latina voice and an older, wiser story
One of Pixar Animation’s most kid-friendly franchises faces aging out in “Cars 3.”
And, along with some long-missing feminine perspective, that actually revitalizes and, um, humanizes the cartoon world of sentient vehicles. For once, a “Cars” movie seems more about characters and story than promoting branded merchandize.
Credit much of that to Brian Fee, who helped write the new sequel’s story and took on its directing duties from the previous two’s Pixar eminence, John Lasseter. Fee led the brain trust that decided series “star,” the Owen Wilson-voiced stock car Lightning McQueen, should find his championship track record threatened by a younger, faster group of computer-enhanced racers.
“From a plot level, we looked at where would Lightning McQueen be in his career 11 years after the first ‘Cars’ film,” explains Fee, who got his start at Pixar doing art for the 2006 “Cars” movie, and now makes his feature directing debut. “To be honest, [NASCAR veteran] Jeff Gordon inspired a lot about Lightning McQueen in the original film, and at the time we started looking into this film, Jeff was on the cusp of retirement. He admitted to us how afraid he was of retirement, how like any athlete, your career kind of has an expiration date on it that’s different from the rest of the world.”
McQueen sees his contemporaries retire, starts losing races to the likes of Armie Hammer’s slick Jackson Storm and crashes into almost irreparable pieces. His long road back begins
This image released by Disney shows Lightning McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson, left, and Cruz Ramirez, voiced by Cristela Alonzo in a scene from “Cars 3.”
at his sponsor, Rust-eze’s, new state-of-the-art electronic racing center in Florida, where his old school instincts clash with the knowledge of his simulator-happy young trainer Cruz Ramirez, voiced by comedian Cristela Alonzo. And though he’s an anthropomorphic, digitally animated automobile, McQueen’s aging issues resonated with the voice behind the picture.
“When John Lasseter and I first met, that might have been right after ‘Shanghai Noon’ or something,” notes Wilson. “So the Lightning McQueen in the first ‘Cars’ is a rookie hotshot and, now, you would think, Oh, it’s just animated and they wouldn’t have to age Lightning McQueen, but that’s what they’re doing. He’s got these sort of young guns nipping at his heels. It seems like this story certainly has more emotion to it than the other ones had.”
Emotion the actor and sometimes writer (Fee says Wilson contributed a lot of his own ideas to McQueen’s dialogue) could relate to. Pushing 50 and the father of two boys now, Owen lost his dad, Robert — the Dallas PBS executive who brought “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” to U.S. TV back in the day — last month.
“I know!” Wilson marvels at how “Cars 3,” however obliquely, reflects his own life passages. “I would’ve thought that, OK, you’re going to confront these issues, maybe, in the live-action part of your career. But who would have thought it would be in the animated portion of my career? You never know what’s going to happen. So, this is an example of art imitating life.
“Yeah, things change,” the actor adds. “I don’t know if that allowed me to bring more to the role or anything like that, but I certainly could relate to some of the stuff that Lightning McQueen feels. But I think anybody can. If you like watching sports, you kind of know that your favorite player, say Brett Favre, is all of a sudden getting squeezed out, and you don’t want to see him go.”
The aging theme was even more personal for Fee.
“My mother had passed away and my father is getting older,” the director reveals. “I kind of had reached that midpoint-in-life thing when I realized I was losing that safety net. I mean, I’m a grown man and I’ve got a job and stuff like that, but when you realize everyone’s not always going to be there for you, you feel this psychological thing like you’re truly on your own.”
Fee quickly points out that he knows that’s not really the case. He has two daughters, for starters, and “Cars 3’s” other overriding theme is aimed their way.
“I wanted there to be a character for girls to get behind, somebody who’d inspire them,” the filmmaker says. “I don’t want it to be a franchise that’s thought of as just for boys. It was unbalanced, I think.”
Enter Cruz, which was originally conceived as a male character but didn’t click until the gender change and really got rolling after Alonzo was cast, and the Pixar folks studied some of her stand-up tapes.
“Pretty soon, the Cruz character was actually modeled after my life,” says the comedienne, who was raised by a poor, single, Spanishspeaking mother in a Texas border town. “You get what she’s gone through, but we don’t overdramatize it. That big speech that Cruz gives, ‘Dream small, they told me,’ that’s actually a line that I tell about my family. Mom always told me to dream small because then my heart wouldn’t be broken. She said it will hurt less if it doesn’t happen, if you go after smaller things.
“In a weird way, I think Cruz humanizes ‘Cars’ and gives the car a heart,” Alonzo reckons. “It’s so weird to say that.”
Instead of following her big dream of being a racer, Cruz became a trainer. And a savvy, cutting-edge one, which initially puts her at odds with instinctual McQueen. But another — well, there’s no other word – humanizing aspect of “Cars 3” is the way the two of them cross their generation gap to support each other.
“In Hollywood, it’s hard to find a mentor when you’re a woman of color,” Alonzo points out. “But I think a very important lesson from this movie we can all benefit from is that both the older and new generations can learn from each other.”
Of course, the “Cars” franchise has been about elders passing down wisdom to newer models since the first film’s Fabulous Hudson Hornet decided to take then-cocky McQueen under his wing. The vintage racer’s voice was provided by the late Paul Newman, who died in 2008, in the first film. And in the new one, too.
How, you may well ask?
“There’s no tomfoolery happening,” Fee explains. “There’s no sound-alike and we’re not doing any magic there. One of the scenes with Paul Newman’s voice is a flashback from the first film; it’s a memory that we completely re-animated. The other times you hear his voice is found audio from the first film. John recorded Paul in between takes, so we have Paul telling stories and all sorts of stuff. Somebody told me we have 28 hours of him on tape.”
Sounds like a lot, but nothing compared to the piles of merchandise “Cars” licenses. That’s kind of referenced in the sequel too, when McQueen discovers that his new boss is actually more interested in putting his name on products than helping him win more races.
Just the way entertainment, whether the motorized or Hollywood kind, works nowadays, right?
“I don’t love how that has sort of crept into the way we talk about things in the culture now,” Wilson laments. “There’s something sort of off-putting about that, especially when it leads to thinking about people as brands. So it wasn’t hard to act that indignation that Lightning McQueen felt.
“But in real life, it is just sort of bizarre that there’s now ‘Cars’ land at Disney,” the actor continues. “Way beyond that, there are toys, lunchboxes, bunk beds ... . It’s all over the place. I could not have predicted that when I first met John Lasseter, that it would become this juggernaut aside from the movie.”
Like many new things, however, there can be some upside in it for an old horse.
“I remember when I worked on ‘Armageddon,’ there was talk that there would be little action figures for all of us,” Wilson recalls. “I was excited about that, but I don’t think mine ever came out; maybe I got killed too early in the film. So I’m happy to finally have a toy that, though it isn’t my likeness, at least has the name of my character. And, now they do put my voice in some of these toys!”