So this week I watched the two CGI movies that came out earlier on that directly competed with each other: Dreamworks’ Over The Hedge and Pixar’s Cars.
Now, they were both great. Let me just say that immediately because it’s quite important. They both had a brilliant voice cast, fantastic visuals, good script elements, and great direction.
And Cars was better.
Over The Hedge was cool… and there were some really genius pieces in it that made you feel like you were watching a classic Warner Bros. style cartoon of Bugs Bunny than a slick CGI motion picture… parts were just brilliantly done. And technically, it had a better and less predictable story than Cars, which was nice.
That was practically Cars’ only downside: it’s story. It was your stock standard Pixar story of trying to find one’s self. It’s been used in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo. Probably even The Incredibles to an extent. It seems to be an underlying structure to Pixar films. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does begin to get a little… boring.
But the movie more than made up for the shortfalls of the story. It was consecutively more funny than Over The Hedge.
For instance, when Over The Hedge made you laugh, it came in bursts. Cars seemed to be mostly constant — for me anyway — which was nice.
The design in Cars was much better than Over The Hedge. Yes, each had incredible animation (the bar just keeps on being raised, making low-level animators like myself feel like we’re never going to get out of this homebrew hole that we’re in), but Cars had more to it design-wise.
From the design of the V8 cafe where they all get oil from (it looks like an engine split up with wrenches connecting it, I think) to the bugs that flying around and look like flies from afar but up close are VW bugs with wings and antennae that drive around on surfaces instead of walking like an actual bug.
The way the characters interact seemed better in Cars too, what with the Italians and the hot-rod characters and… it’s just really remarkable.
Even the end credits… hell, especially the end credits, where Lasseter and the team were so creative they went back to movies like Toy Story, Monsters Inc., and A Bug’s Life and redid scene from those movies as for how they’d be in the world of Cars. It was really quite creative and worth watching just for that… even though there’s so much more to the movie than just the end credits.
The soundtracks on both Cars and Over The Hedge were great, by the way. Soundtracks and scores are one of my most favourite parts of movies and TV shows and neither of them disappointed.
I do however have one minor quibble, and it’s with Cars.
It’s something that I’m not too sure many people would have thought about (probably because they’re not insane like myself) and yet it was the first thing that struck me as you see the Cars take to the track.
You see, the cars are racing on a speedway, but whereas I expected people to be in the crowd, the crowd is made up of other cars… which makes me think that rather than watching a car race, aren’t we technically watching more of an athletics event than a car race?
If people (like you or me… okay, maybe not me… I’m bored by athletics, but that’s not the point) attend a track & field event… say we go see a runner run or jump hurdles… we’re humans at an event we’re humans are racing other humans.
Based on that logic, if cars are attending an event whereby they’re watching cars race other cars on a track, couldn’t one take away from it that they’re watching an automobile athletics event rather than a car racing event.
If the cars were racing in giant people-shaped vehicles… or anything shaped vehicles really… just so long as they were in a vehicle that wasn’t their own body… it could be considered a car race.
I’m looking too far into this, I know, but this is just some of the crap you have to contend with when you have my brain.
Now, aren’t you lucky you don’t?