Cars 3 looks to be the sports movie that Cars almost was and Cars 2 certainly wasn’t.
A quarter of Pixar’s press presentation – roughly 40 minutes – is spent discussing the history of NASCAR: information that the bulk of Disney bloggers and Pixar podcasters and tech writers, except for, ostensibly, one, seem to have zero expertise in. The reason for this lesson is the inclusion of a wealth of NASCAR history in the movie – “We’re trying to show all the different eras, all the different cars,” we’re told by Ray Evernham, a former Crew Chief for Hendrick motorsports and a consultant on the film. Thus began a journey from Daytona beach in the 1950’s, where runners of moonshine would race each other when they weren’t outrunning the cops, to today’s sponsor-saturated NASCAR as we know it. For such a niche subject, the interest of the room seemed to hold pretty steadily, probably due to the charismatic leading men presenting – the creative director of the movie, Jay Ward, was also there – and the comfort of the chairs, which really can’t be overstated (we were sitting in the owner’s lounge. The owners of the racecars, that is).
The bulk of Cars 3’s plot seems to me to be modelled as a sort of apolitical Rocky IV. That’s the one, if you remember, where old Rocky is tapped to fight the Soviet boxing champion, Drago, after Drago kills his rival and friend Apollo Creed in the ring. Rocky, in a rather formulaic ending that’s only notable for its brazen commitment to its hero, goes on to all but singlehandedly defeat communism by besting the Russian giant. The film exists firmly in the mid-80’s, and the most telling scene is the one where our man jogs through the Siberian wilderness (tailed by Soviet spies, of course) leaping over snowy creek beds and hauling around fallen tree trunks to bulk up like some sort of purgatorial Paul Bunyon, all while Drago the Terrible sits in a lab built of dusty green haze and mechanized synth-pop having his biceps beefed up by skinny men in lab coats poking him with needles.
This very unsubtle contrast between an automated, synthetic training and a real, elbow-grease-involved, decidedly American athleticism also seems to be the foundation of tension in Cars 3. Lightning McQueen’s new rival is Storm, a sleek black and indigo speed demon who spends his training days on a simulator and couldn’t care less about the history of his sport. He’s young, and cocky, built from the ground up by corporate sponsors, whose role in the sport, to quote Ray, just gets “bigger and bigger and bigger.” When he beats Lightning in a race, near the film’s opening (the source of the controversially dark teaser for the movie), it starts our hero on his own training regimen in an ultra-expensive, technologically advanced gym. But to beat Storm, of course, McQueen will have to forego the simulator and the treadmill and instead commit to the tried-and-true method of racing on dirt. (And mud. More on this later.) Said dirt will also take him through a history of racing’s finest, meeting, in an old dried-up town, the cars that inspired him in the first place, who are all shaped after real NASCAR legends. We’re shown various slides of racing icons next to their Cars 3 counterparts – pastel vehicles with grilled mustaches and faded logos. “When we build these guys,” Ray tells us, “We’re trying to make their personality, their history, all in one car.” Hence our crash-course in NASCAR lore.
It may not sound new, and it certainly isn’t; Pixar, though, has absolutely turned formula into magic time and time again, and I’d be lying if I said the footage I’ve seen doesn’t seem to be a more mature and interesting use of the novelty world we were introduced to in 2006. That said, it’s hard not to view the setup as retrograde, and, in our current era, that can be scary – particularly the romanticizing of some sort of lost “Americanism” that never was. (“We heard all the different stories about these drivers, and this theme kept coming up, this theme of rebellion,” we’re told later, by Mike Rich, one of the lead writers. “That it’s really a sport of rebellion. They were driving fast because they had to drive fast, because they were running moonshine. They were outrunning the cops.” If that’s not an American tale, I don’t know what is.) Last year’s La La Land received, amidst glowing critical praise, plenty of political backlash for its nostalgia bone and overwhelming whiteness, a coupling that is at least alarming in our current moment. At most, that marriage can be damaging. And it’s also hard to fight the argument that NASCAR has been and is a very white sport, or that it seems, to many of us, rooted primarily in a culture that’s also typically held less-than-sensitive views on people of color’s representation, in film and otherwise.
And so: we return to Pixar’s NASCAR presentation, where the couches are still very comfortable and the charismatic Ray is telling us about Louise Smith, the first female NASCAR driver, and Wendell Scott, the African-American racer who had to act as his own pit crew because no one else would do it for him. Both had their trophies denied or revoked more than once, and Wendell is the only black man to be featured in the slideshow. One of the last images we’re shown is a couple of the young women who are gaining prominence in the sport; our NASCAR liaison says: “As the sport becomes more technical and less physical, it’s being opened up to more women. With all the new technology, they don’t have to be as physical… They’ve just got to be smarter.”
Let us mention here, too, the addition to the Cars canon one Cruz Ramirez, voiced by the comedian Cristela Alonzo, who plays the main supporting role in the film – taking over a job previously held by Larry the Cable Guy’s Tow-Mater. Cruz’s inclusion, and the casting of a Latina actress, is welcome and worthwhile, and there’s a scene in the cut we were shown where she spells out to Lightning, in typically coded-for-adults Pixar fashion, the insidiousness of society’s latent misogyny. It’s a great scene, and Pixar seems to know it’s the heart of the film – it was the last bit we were shown in the 40 minutes of footage.
In other words, Cars 3 is like every other sports movie in that it’s about racing while not being about racing: really, it’s about individualism and success and hard work and respect. And these ideas, though admirable at face value, can sometimes be tenuous to promote in contrast or as an alternative to change; this is especially true in the context of a sport that’s proven decidedly inhospitable to non-white-male competitors. It’s good that Pixar is aware of that tightrope, even if I find it strange that I’m sitting in a million-dollar owner’s lounge listening to men talk about engines.
The film hits theaters on June 16.
