FOUR FROM PIXAR
Have you ever read a story or watched a movie that you thought was going in one direction and then went in an entirely different one? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is a prime example, when you first see it. But I’m not just talking about a switch in the direction of the narrative, but a shift in what the story seems to be about thematically. What if you think that the story is expressing one point of view and then you realize that it is actually saying something quite different? In other words, what if you, as a member of the audience, think that the story means something different than what the creator seemed to intend? I will avoid the overused word “deconstruction” here, but this is what I am about to do to the new animated feature film from Disney and Pixar: Brave, from a story by Brenda Chapman, the film’s direction is credited to both Chapman and Mark Andrews. And as always, I am putting you on spoiler alert: in critiquing the film, I am going to write about what happens in this story from beginning to end.
Accompanying Brave is a new Pixar animated short, La Luna, directed by Enrico Casarova. It reminds me of children’s stories in which the universe actually is like it seems to small children, before they learn how science describes it. As I pointed out in a previous column, P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books are like this. And so in La Luna, the moon isn’t as big or as far away as science tells us; if you have a long enough rope or ladder, you can climb up to the moon. Moreover, rather than being gigantic balls of super-heated gas, stars really are small five-pointed objects that shine in the sky, and so meteors, as falling stars, also look like that. The three cast members of La Luna are a boy, a man, and an old man; they do not talk in a way we can understand, but we may assume they are a boy, his father, and his grandfather. Their duty is to climb up to the moon, which is covered by the small, fallen stars, and sweep it clean. The short is charming and beautiful, but I kept wondering why the characters were trying to get rid of the fallen stars. The moon looks better covered with them; when they sweep an area clean, what’s left is a gray barren patch of lunar landscape. The high point of the short comes when a particularly large star falls onto the moon; the boy hits it just right and it shatters into many small stars, creating a lovely glow that impressed the father and grandfather. But of the stars are so pretty, why get rid of them? And where did the fallen stars go when the moon is swept clean? It’s as if the short is going in opposite directions at once: showing the fallen stars to be beautiful, yet at the same time insisting on sending them into oblivion.
Similarly, Brave seems to go in two different directions. The advertising for the film focused on the image of the young heroine, Merida, a princess of a clan in 10th century Scotland, holding a bow and aiming an arrow. Like this summer’s other young female archer in the movies, Katniss in The Hunger Games, Merida echoes the image of the Greek goddess Artemis, known as Diana to the Romans, the huntress. One widely seen trailer for the movie consisted of an entire scene from the first act of the film, in which several comical contestants compete in archery to win Merida’s hand in marriage. Then Merida herself joins the competition, declaring she will win her own hand, or, in other words, compete to win her independence, rather than submit to an arranged marriage. She wins in spectacular fashion. From all of this, it would seem that the film will be a story about female empowerment, a feminist story about breaking free from the restrictions imposed by a male-dominated society and traditional female roles. Even the title of the film, Brave, suggests it will be an adventure or quest film, in which the heroine will prove her courage, and thereby prove her right to be treated as men’s equal. Moreover, it has been widely observed that Brave is Pixar’s first feature film with a female lead character. I consider Elastigirl to be one of the leads of Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004), but she shares that title with her husband; Brave focuses on a single female lead, although, as we shall see, Merida’s mother, Queen Elinor, is nearly as important. So, again, one might have expected story about female empowerment and equality, perhaps somewhat like Disney’s animated film Mulan (1998), whose young heroine poses as a male warrior in China centuries ago, becomes a great hero, and ultimately is recognized and acclaimed as a woman for her bravery.
The feminist aspects of Brave are clear enough. Scenes of Merida’s childhood show that her father gave her a bow and encouraged her wish to learn archery, considered a skill for men, while her mother disapproved. The first act shows how Queen Elinor keeps insisting that Merida should not use a bow and arrow, and should conform to traditional women’s roles and behavior, including allowing herself to be married off to the son of the leader of one of the three other clans.
But you can also see Merida’s rebellion in other contexts. For one, there’s a generational gap between Merida and Elinor, with Merida representing a more modern view of women’s role in society. Merida represents the future, and, indeed, her point of view on arranged marriages wins out at the film’s end.
Furthermore, Brave can be seen as a story about anyone, male or female, young or older, pursuing his own sense of self, his own ambitions, and his own muse, despite the pressure to conform to more conventional social roles. Elinor attempts to limit what Merida’s role in society, and indeed her personality, can be. Elinor disapproves of Merida’s archery, disapproves of the way Merida laughs, and indeed disapproves of pretty much everything Merida does, while insisting that Merida conform to Elinor’s ideas of proper feminine behavior. Before the archery competition, Elinor has Merida war a confining gown, literally forcing her into what Elinor considers proper shape, and makes her wear a headdress that conceals all of Merida’s red hair, the visual sign of her distinctive individuality. Defiantly, Merida keeps one strand of her hair visible.
One could interpret Merida’s passion for archery as a metaphor for anyone’s passion for his or her goal in life. She develops her skill in archery just as a creative person strives to master his or her skill as a writer or artist or whatever his or her chosen profession may be.
There’s also a stirring sequence in which Merida rides her horse through the woods, firing arrows with perfect accuracy at targets as she rushes by. It’s an image of freedom, joy, and self-expression through exercising one’s talents. It also links Merida with the natural world. Brave depicts the landscapes of Scotland beautifully. I saw the film in 3-D, and it’s only in these dazzling portrayals of the natural world that I thought the 3-D was truly effective in heightening the beauty of the film. Merida seems to be happier, freer, and more able to be herself within the natural world than in the civilized one, where she is hemmed in by the pressure to follow prescribed roles and modes of behavior. Even her lush, somewhat unruly red hair seems to express a certain wildness in her personality, another link to nature. The film seems to suggest a connection between Merida and the natural world, and that it is more natural for her to express herself through such means as riding and archery than to conform to the oppressive roles society would force her to adopt.
So this first act of the film builds towards the archery contest, when Merida asserts her independence and right to follow her own desires through her triumph there. What is her next step up from there in her liberation?
Instead, she is forced to go backwards. Her mother, Queen Elinor, is outraged, and forces her back into the castle. Though we have seen in flashbacks how close Merida and Elinor were when Merida was a small child, now they are angrily at odds with each other. Elinor throws Merida’s bow into the flames of a fireplace, as if symbolically to destroy her art and the means of her self-liberation. Merida tears a tapestry that depicts her and Elinor, thus literally rending one from the other. Merida escapes into the woods. Significantly, the bow is not consumed by the flames, and Elinor seems to regret having cast it into the fire; perhaps the implication is that Merida’s art and ambition are not so easily destroyed.
Whether in fairy tales or in Shakespearean comedy and romance, the forest is a place in which change can occur; it is also a place that hides the dark side of existence. Within the forest Merida encounters a witch, and asks her for the means to “change her fate” by altering her mother’s opposition. The witch sells her an enchanted cake, and Merida returns to the castle and gives it to Elinor. Upon eating the cake, Elinor magically transforms into a bear, initially terrifying Merida. In this form Elinor can no longer speak, and can no longer act as queen, controlling Merida’s life. But it soon becomes clear that Elinor-as-bear is no threat to Merida as yet; she retains her human personality. But unable to talk, and having difficulty adapting to moving in her new form, Elinor is now relatively helpless; moreover, if the men in the castle see her, she will be killed.
Thus Brave, with seeming abruptness, at least on first viewing, changes the apparent direction of its story. Merida insists that she is not responsible for Elinor’s transformation, and that the witch is to blame. But of course Merida really is to blame. She overreached by making the bargain with the witch, who seems not evil but eccentric. Merida should have known better than to deal in magic when she did not know exactly what it would do. This seems comparable to the mistake that Ariel makes in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), selling her voice to a witch in change for getting human legs, enabling her to walk on land and meet the prince she loves. Ariel’s bargain also has negative consequences she did not foresee, but at least Ariel chose only to handicap herself by the spell, by losing her voice. Merida was attempting to change her fate not through her own actions but by magically forcing her mother to change.
Merida has transformed her mother into a potentially dangerous beast. Could this be a metaphor, suggesting that by rebelling against her mother’s wishes, Merida has turned her into a powerful and wrathful enemy?
The film seemed to spend its first act getting the audience on Merida’s side. But is it now suggesting that Merida was wrong to rebel and to assert herself? There have been hints before this. In arguments with her mother, Merida could come off as a teenager having a tantrum. The queen also contended that it was necessary to marry Merida off to the son of one of the clan leaders in order to preserve peace among the clans. According to the queen, by refusing to wed any of the sons, Merida was acting irresponsibly, threatening to throw Scotland into civil war. I don’t think that the film backs up this idea with sufficient dramatic force. The clansmen all seem like buffoons rather than potential threats. At one point Elinor puts an end to brawling by asserting her authority with the clan leaders. Moreover, later on, as we shall see, the clansmen are easily persuaded to give up the idea of arranged marriages.
From this point on, Merida is no longer striving for freedom and self-realization; instead, she is a sinner who has harmed her mother, in a sort of magical matricide in which she destroyed her mother’s human identity, and who now must clean up the mess that she made. Merida has Elinor-as-bear leave the castle with her, and they go into the woods, where Merida watches over her transformed mother and searches for a means of reversing the spell, which will otherwise soon become permanent.
Being transformed from a human into an animal has a long tradition as a trope in Disney animated features. It goes back to Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone (1963), which was based on the book of the same name by T. H. White, that was originally published in 1938. In both the book and film, the magician Merlin magically transforms the boy who is the future King Arthur into different animals in order to teach him about different aspects of life. In later animated films the protagonist is transformed into an animal against his or her will: examples include The Emperor’s New Groove (2001), Brother Bear (2003), and The Princess and the Frog (2009). In each of these cases, as with Elinor in Brave, the transformation becomes a learning experience. The idea seems to be to strip the character of all of the exterior trappings of his or her identity—his or her role in society, clothing, and even his or her human appearance—leaving only the core elements of the character’s identity, his or her personality and set of moral values. The character has left behind his or her old human identity to enter a transitional state, represented by being an animal, in which he or she can explore his or her psyche more deeply. Within this physically transformed state, the character can work a change in his or her own psyche. The Princess and the Frog was fairly explicit about this, when the voodoo sorceress Mama Odie counsels the transformed heroine and hero in song to “Dig a Little Deeper” to discover what they truly want and need in life. Once the protagonist has learned his or her lesson and changed in his or her outlook on life, then the protagonist can resume his or her human form. The human identity has thus been purified, if you will: the protagonist’s personality flaw has been overcome. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) transformed a human prince into a beast, causing him to take on the bestial image of his own dark side, although he retained his clothing, palace, and ability to talk. But he too turned out to be in a transitional state, undergoing a learning experience, and once he learned and experienced love and self-sacrifice, he underwent a symbolic death and resurrection, returning to human form, purged of evil.
It quickly becomes clear that the transformed Elinor is not a threat, or not yet, since if the spell is not broken, she will become a bear in both mind and body. For now, though, Elinor retains a human personality, though she cannot speak. But in her bewilderment over her condition and her difficulty in coping with her new form, Elinor now seems somewhat childlike. Merida now has to take care of her, try to protect her from being hunted and killed by the men of the clans, and even teaches her how to catch fish to eat, as a real bear would. Merida, the daughter who struggled against her mother’s control, now has to assume a protective role towards Elinor. In short, Merida and Elinor have reversed positions, and Merida acts something like the “mother” in this relationship.
There was something similar going on in director Brad Bird’s animated film for Warner Bros., The Iron Giant (1999). Its young protagonist, Hogarth, was somewhat rebellious against his mother’s authority. He discovers the Iron Giant, an immense alien robot of great potentially destructive power, who finds himself in an unfamiliar world, Earth. Hogarth assumes a “parental” role towards the robot, who has a childlike personality. Hogarth protects the robot as best he can and teaches him, encouraging him to protect life rather than take it. Through teaching and caring for the Iron Giant, Hogarth learns to take responsibility and achieves a degree of maturity.
So in both The Iron Giant and Brave, there is a young person who learns responsibility by becoming the guardian and teacher—surrogate parent—of a much larger figure, who has childlike difficulty in coping with his or her new situation. Although the Iron Giant and Elinor-as-bear are peaceful, and indeed, in some ways helpless and in need of guidance, they are both large figures of great power, and each, at moments, abruptly and temporarily changes personality, becoming dangerously destructive. The Iron Giant and Elinor-as-bear may partly represent sides of Hogarth and Merida themselves: the childlike rebelliousness with the potential to cause serious trouble, especially when they grow into adults. By guiding and teaching the Iron Giant and Elinor-as-bear, Hogarth and Merida are figuratively taming their own inner demons.
So, within the forest, Merida and Elinor both undergo changes. Elinor has already been physically changed into a bear, but she learns to appreciate her daughter, who has taken charge and points out that it is her skill with a bow that is enabling them to survive in the wilderness. Merida is changing by going from being her mother’s opponent to being her protector. Moreover, the two of them are now working together, renewing their bond. Merida eventually learns that the way to undo the spell is to repair the torn tapestry, thus figuratively bringing herself and Elinor back together. Having already grown closer together in their sojourn in the wilderness, they return to the castle to find the tapestry.
In the castle Merida makes a speech to the clansmen in which she is about to agree to the arranged marriage to prevent war from breaking out. But Elinor, though she cannot talk, uses gestures to direct Merida to say something different: to argue that there should not be forced marriages and that the first-born of the clans—herself as well as the sons—should get married when and to whom they want. The clansmen accept the idea; the sons, it seems, didn’t like the idea of arranged marriages either.
Now this scene shows that Elinor has changed inwardly too, and that she now accepts Merida’s point of view about enforced marriage. It’s also significant that Elinor and Merida worked together to make this speech. Still, this scene bothers me. Merida was on the brink of surrendering her independence and submitting to this male-dominated system; it is only because Elinor changed her own mind that she didn’t. It’s as if it was wrong for Merida to assert her own independence, and as if she could only have it if her mother, an authority figure, gave her consent. But surely having the rights to be oneself and to be free are not dependent on getting the permission of people in power, who could just as easily deny them. Perhaps that what New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis meant in her review of Brave by writing “But hers is a contingent freedom won with smiles, acquiescence and a literal needle and thread with which she neatly sews up the story, repairing a world where girls and women know exactly where they stand.”
Bears had actually become extinct in Britain centuries before the time in which Brave is set, but all the bears who appear in Brave are actually magically transformed humans. Towards the film’s end Elinor-as-bear turns into a wild bear mentally as well and attacks Merida and her father. But then another human-turned-bear, Mor’du, who has become a vicious killer, appears. Elinor-as-bear defends her husband and daughter by attacking and killing Mor’du. This could be interpreted as Elinor figuratively defeating her own dark side, the beast within herself, that had also manifested itself in her former rage at Merida. The death of Mor’du releases the spirit of the prince he once was, appearing again in human form, suggesting that Elinor has not only destroyed the evil Mor’du’s bear form represented, but purified and liberated the human within, just as her own experience in bear form is changing her.
Early in the film Merida had angrily ripped a tapestry that pictured herself and her mother, thus figuratively tearing their relationship asunder. In the final act Merida races on horseback to save her mother, but this time she is not shooting arrows as she rides, but knitting the tapestry back together. This is what Ms. Dargis means by the “literal needle and thread.” Repairing the tapestry figuratively means restoring the loving relationship between mother and daughter; in the story it also literally serves to undo the magic spell that turned Elinor into a bear. The image of Merida riding on horseback while knitting suggests that she has succeeded in fusing her own image of herself, the archer and free spirit, racing through the woods, with the more conventional feminine role that Elinor intended for her, since sewing is a craft traditionally associated with women.
Disney animated films have a tradition of symbolic death and resurrection scenes. In Brave Elinor seems to be dying as a result of the battle with Mor’du. Merida covers her with the repaired tapestry, the symbol of the renewed bond between them. Significantly, nothing happens until Merida weeps, finally acknowledges that she is responsible for the trouble that befell Elinor, and voices her love for her mother. In other words, Merida confesses her sin and demonstrates her repentance. As a result Elinor revives, transformed back to her human form. The film emphasizes the point that Elinor is nude beneath the tapestry. That works symbolically, too: she has undergone a physical and spiritual rebirth, and newborns are naked. It might also suggest that Elinor is now characterized not by her queen’s garments, the symbols of authority, but by what she is now wearing, the tapestry that commemorates the love between mother and daughter.
It has been widely noted that Brave does not follow the usual pattern of Disney “princess” movies by uniting its heroine romantically with a male hero, a trope that could be interpreted as suggesting that marriage is a woman’s ultimate goal. Instead Brave puts its emphasis on the bond between mother and daughter, concluding with an image of Merida and Elinor riding on horses together in the woods. Merida and Elinor are united through love, and the fact that they are both riding horses (Merida’s pastime), but at a slow pace (in keeping with Elinor’s more stately manner), suggests that they are combining and merging their lifestyles and interests into something they can share.
So Brave starts out as what seems to be a fable of feminist liberation, but then abruptly shifts gears and turns into a parable about resolving the division between mother and daughter, or to take the theme further, between parent and child, or even between generations. My problem with the film is that I find the first act, about Merida’s liberation, to be more stirring, dramatic and involving than the rest of the film. The rest of the movie, about Merida’s efforts to help her transformed mother, seem to me less imaginative, less strongly plotted, and less dramatically affecting than the saga of Merida’s rebellion against what did indeed seem like the oppressiveness of a society that attempted the force women into certain roles and modes of behavior. As Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy wrote, “What results is a film that starts off big and promising but diminishes into a rather wee thing as it chugs along. . . .”
Moreover, the movie seems to me to imply that Merida’s rebellion was wrong; the story forces her to do penance for her actions, and even offer herself up as a pawn in marriage to keep peace in the male-dominated social order. She does not get forced into an unwanted marriage, but only because her mother changes her mind about it. Merida does not win her freedom so much as it is granted to her by an authority figure. Brave starts out as a story of Merida’s one-woman revolution, and then shifts to a more conservative mode, in which the individual must sacrifice her freedom to society, and liberty is granted, not won. Perhaps I would feel that there was more balance in the movie had it allowed us to see more clearly into the mind of Elinor as her attitudes towards her daughter were changing, but Elinor-as-bear could not talk. Merida remained the sole point-of-view character in the film, and as she changed from feminist rebel to repentant sinner, I felt that Brave shifted in direction to a story I found much less appealing.
TOY STORY 3
Due to my two year sabbatical from writing “Comics in Context,” I haven’t yet commented on two other recent Pixar features, both sequels: Toy Story 3 (2010), directed by Lee Unkrich, and Cars 2 (2011), directed by Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and Brad Lewis.
The Toy Story movies establish that toys are alive but they only talk and move when people cannot see them. (This is an old trope in animated films, and there are many vintage animated cartoons showing toys or books coming to life after dark.) One of the aspects of Toy Story 3 that I found startling was its far from sentimental attitude towards small children. The original Toy Story (1995) drew a sharp contrast between Andy, the boy who owns, plays with, and loves Woody, Buzz, and the other principal toy characters, and his neighbor Sid, who destroys toys and constructs distorted, monstrous toys out of toy parts. In Toy Story 3 Andy has grown old enough to leave for college. Accidentally discarded, most of the principal toy characters find a new home at the Sunnyside day care center. However, Sunnyside’s head toy, Lotso the bear, runs the place like a prison camp: he imprisons Andy’s toys at night and forces them to serve as the playthings for young toddlers during the day. The toddlers are portrayed as wildly, insensitively destructive; it is clear that the toys will not survive for long if they have to put up with such rough treatment every day. But it’s also surprising, in a Disney family film, to see small children depicted, not as sweet and innocent, but as so insensitively brutal. Is it just that they are too young to have a sense of responsibility? Or is the film hinting that kindness and sensitivity among small children is a rare trait? The daycare center kids seem to represent a generation of bullies.
The story of Toy Story 3 becomes a partly comedic, partly serious variation on movies about escaping from prison or a prison camp, like The Great Escape (1963). What is even more startling is just how dark the film becomes. The toys escape from Sunnyside to a garbage dump where they get on a conveyor belt leading to a shredder. They escape only to become trapped on another conveyor belt inexorably moving towards an incinerator. Thinking themselves doomed, the toys link hands. Their destruction seems inescapable. The scene is an evocation of inevitable mortality, that seems startling and even chilling in the context of an animated film about children’s toys, perhaps the last place where one would expect a fearsome image of death. Indeed, being burned up by the incinerator seems a particularly horrible way to perish; the incinerator’s flames also seem like an allusion to hell. At the last moment the toys are saved by a giant claw manipulated by the toy Little Green Men aliens from the previous Toy Story films. It seems like a miraculous escape. Consider that in the Toy Story movies the Little Green Men seem to worship the claw as if it were the hand of God. So having the claw rescue the Toy Story toys seems like the filmmakers’ joke on the old concept from Greek tragedy of the deus ex machina, the god descending from the machine. That phrase has also come to mean a plot device that is suddenly introduced to resolve a seemingly insoluble problem.
The main dilemma in Toy Story 3 is what will happen to the toys when their owner, Andy, grows too old for them and moves on towards adulthood. Will they be destroyed or discarded? The solution comes when Andy gives them to a young girl names Bonnie, who will now care for and play with them. Unlike the kids at the day care center, Bonnie is the kind of caring, sensitive child that will take good care of the toys. As sentient beings, the toys need someone to play with; you could say that they need an audience.
I suggest that, among other things, Toy Story 3 is also about popular culture and generational change. For popular culture creations to endure, they have to be accepted and embraced from one generation to the next. Presumably the creative people at Pixar have created characters who have entertained people ranging from small children to adults over the last two decades. Presumably the Pixar creative teams hope that these characters and films will continue to entertain future generations as well. Indeed, the ideal may be that the Pixar characters and films of the 1990s and early 2000s will continue to appeal to new generations after their original audiences have passed away, just as Walt Disney’s classic films and characters still do. To my mind, Andy’s passing the toys along to Bonnie can represent how popular culture creations, if they are true classics, will be passed from the generation for whom they were created on to the next generation.
After all, how many examples of such enduring pop culture characters can you think of in your own lives? Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Superman and Batman, among many others, were created when my parents were young, long before my birth, yet I accepted them all when I was growing up. The first Star Wars film premiered after I’d become an adult, but now there are younger generations who also love the Star Wars films yet can’t remember a time when the first film did not exist.
You could also say that the toys in Toy Story 3 need a director or writer. The films show how Andy imagined stories in which the toys played roles; Toy Story 3 even begins with Andy’s fantasy of the toy characters acting in a Western with science fiction elements. Significantly, in turning the toys over to Bonnie, Andy describes them in terms of their characters and the roles they play in his games. Bonnie too will invent scenarios for stories in which the toys will play parts. Andy and Bonnie are not simply an audience for the toys; they are the creators of their imagined adventures. So I also interpret Andy passing the toys over to Bonnie as a metaphor for the original creators of a pop culture concept passing the torch to a new generation of creators. Again, you can see this in the history of long-running characters and series in popular culture. Consider how many generations of creators have now served their time as the caretakers of the Marvel and DC Comics characters who have now existed for a half century or much longer, and will keep going probably long after we have all passed from the scene.
Toy Story 3 raises the specter of inevitable mortality, but it also shows how artistic creations can indeed achieve immortality.
CARS 2
As for Cars 2 it was generally regarded by critics as a disappointment, and I agree that it wasn’t as satisfying as past Pixar features, although I found it pleasant enough to watch. Though it was a sequel to the original Cars, it was about as different as a sequel can be. The Cars movies are set in an alternate universe in which humans are absent and cars are living, sentient beings. (Who built them? How do the cars construct buildings and machines when they have no hands? How do they reproduce? These are questions that apparently we should not ask, lest the entire premise of the series collapse.) The first Cars was the story of racing car Lightning McQueen, who is arrogant and obsessed with winning, who gets stuck in a small town out West, Radiator Springs, learns humility and the virtues of friendship and community, and comes to value these things more than racing victories. It would seem that the people at Pixar decided that McQueen’s character did not need further major development; after all, he does seem to have become as good as he can be by the end of the first film. So Cars 2 focuses instead on Mater, the tow truck with the voice of a rural Southerner, a comic relief character who became McQueen’s friend in the first film. It appears that Mater is considered the breakout character in Cars, since he is the main character in the Cars Toons shorts, titled Mater’s Tall Tales, that have followed, as well as the lead in Cars 2. In the shorts McQueen and Mater reverse positions, and McQueen seems like Mater’s sidekick.
In the first Cars McQueen was the proverbial “fish out of water,” the celebrity from the big city who was stuck in a small town. The “fish out of water” theme continues in Cars 2, but this time it applies to Mater. First, Mater accompanies McQueen abroad to Japan, Italy, and England, where McQueen is racing in a “World Grand Prix.” Second, Mater is mistakenly identified as an American spy by members of British intelligence and gets caught up in their effort to thwart a criminal conspiracy. Whereas the first Cars was a story of small town life, Cars 2 is a partly humorous, partly serious spy story with international settings. If the first Cars seems modeled on the 1991 film Doc Hollywood, then Cars 2 echoes thrillers about ordinary individuals who are mistaken for spies or recruited into being spies. The example that first comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), in which Cary Grant’s character, a New York advertising executive, is mistaken for a an American secret agent by enemy spies, an ends up accepting the role that was forced upon him in order to combat them.
What I most liked about Cars 2 were the international settings: the film’s richly detailed and handsomely depicted versions of Tokyo, Italy, and London, all created on computers, with certain clever alterations to reflect the fact that the culture is designed by cars, not humans. I also like the British spy car characters. In the original Cars the late Paul Newman was cast as McQueen’s mentor Doc Hudson, surely in part to evoke Newman’s past association with driving racing cars, both on and off screen. (Lightning McQueen’s last name refers to the late Steve McQueen, another actor associated with racing.) In Cars 2 the lead British spy car, Finn McMissile, is voiced by Michael Caine, surely in part to evoke Caine’s past roles in spy movies such as The Ipcress File (1965). Through their acting skills and associations with past films, Newman and Caine brought a sense of authority to their roles in the Cars movies while linking those films to cinematic traditions of stories about car racing and spies, respectively. I also liked Emily Mortimer’s vocal performance as McMissile’s fellow spy Holley Shiftwell, succeeding in conveying an appealingly sexy personality through her voice alone. However, I find it hard to believe that Ms. Shiftwell would end up falling for Mater, and this leads me to the film’s biggest problems.
One problem is that the spy storyline isn’t that interesting or imaginative. Are these adult viewers of Cars 2 who can’t spot who the secret mastermind behind the conspiracy is a mile off? The bigger, key problem with Cars 2 is that Mater doesn’t have the depth as a character to carry the film as its lead. If Cars 2 had been a farcical comedy, yes. However likable Mater is, he is basically a comedic stereotype of a rural Southerner who isn’t very bright: a comical redneck, to use a term that some Southerners embrace while others regard it as disparaging (rather like “geek” and “nerd” in comics culture). As depicted in the Cars films, Mater isn’t really stupid, as the stereotype implies; he’s more likably childlike, characterized by a boyish enthusiasm. Indeed, in Cars 2 he proves to have enormous knowledge about the inner workings of automobiles. But is it credible that anyone would think Mater was a master spy who was just pretending to be a hick? Even more importantly, the audience is meant to feel sorry for Mater, first, when he has a falling out with his best friend McQueen. Then we are meant to sympathize with Mater as he realizes how little other characters think of his true personality; the British spies initially only take him seriously because they assume that he is merely feigning his hick persona as a sort of disguise. By the film’s end the British spies recognize Mater’s true personality and Mater proves himself to be a genuine hero, but it still seems to me unlikely that Holley would want to date him, as she says she does Mater makes such a strong impression as a comedy stereotype, and the filmmakers’ efforts in Cars 2 to give him a serious side, and more dimension to his personality, just fall short. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, but it’s an uphill effort, and as far as I’m concerned, Cars 2 doesn’t pull it off. Perhaps a different sort of storyline could. And since Mater continues to appear in new animation, perhaps someday Pixar will find the way to bring it off.
“Comics in Context” #245
Copyright 2012 Peter SandersonCLICK HERE FOR THE COMICS IN CONTEXT ARCHIVES
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