Cars 3

Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to Emeryville, California to screen footage from Pixar’s Cars 3, at the company’s headquarters and studio. At these sorts of advanced screenings it’s made clear from the start that you’re not seeing the entire movie, only select portions, and the amount they show you can vary. I attended a similar preview for The Good Dinosaur a few years ago in New York City and only saw three brief scenes from the movie.

To date, Pixar Animation Studios has released 17 feature films. 16 hold positive ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. The lone exception? Cars 2. And the second-lowest scoring Pixar movie on Rotten Tomatoes is the first Cars, with a 74 percent rating. Critics don’t like Cars.

Who knew automated vehicles were also subject to the scrutiny that comes with aging? They may not have to worry about wrinkles, greying hair, or sagging skin, but when cars reach a certain age, it’s straight to the junkyard. (This incites a whole other philosophical discussion around the Cars characters and whether or not they are sentient beings – is their consciousness the engine or the frame, the ghost or the shell?) In Cars 3, racing champ Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is forced to retirement as a brand new racer enters the game.

Over 22 years, Pixar Animation Studios has released 17 movies (the 18th, Cars 3, opens in theaters in June) made by hundreds of artists and animators. Their stories feature princesses, monsters, ants, robots, superheroes, fish, and the embodiments of human emotions; their settings range from a child’s suburban bedroom to the rat-infested kitchen of a Parisian restaurant. But all of these movies, no matter what they’re about or who made them, all share a few common elements, principles the filmmakers at Pixar use to guide their work.

As the previous teasers already implied, Cars 3 is going to be a little…darker than previous Cars movies. In Pixar’s third installment of the hit franchise, Owen Wilson’s legendary race car Lightning McQueen is forced into retirement following a traumatic crash, and with all the shiny, young new cars — like Jackson Storm — dominating the track, Lightning has a tough road ahead if he wants to remain relevant. That’s a pretty heavy-sounding plot, but as the full trailer for Cars 3 proves, it’s not all doom and gloom in Cars World.

Children’s entertainment is full of anthropomorphized objects and animals. To kids, talking automobiles are no more or less strange than babies who are bosses or teenage turtles who get mutated into ninja warriors. But to the parents and adults who watch the Cars movies with these children, their internal logic and rules are a source of endless fascination.

Cars 3 is a thing I keep forgetting is happening. It isn’t exactly a Pixar sequel people are dying to see – does anyone who’s not an eight-year-old actually love the Cars movies? Either way, the new film is still on the way and today Disney has announced three new voice actors joining the cast with new character photos.

To kids, Cars is a signature Pixar franchise, known for that little red race car, Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson). To older Pixar fans, Cars is known as Pixar’s red-headed stepchild, well below the rest of the venerable animation studio’s output. Cars was never particularly well-liked in the first place and then along came Cars 2 which was wild and weird and not particularly great (although the movie is so wild and weird it’s kind of interesting).

Describing a car as “villainous” is kind of silly, but this is the world of Pixar, where it’s totally normal for inanimate objects to become anthropomorphic friends and foes. The latest batch of photos from Cars 3 reveal a bit of both, including our first look at new baddie Jackson Storm, voiced by Armie Hammer. Pixar has also revealed some additional plot details from their next big sequel, which hits theaters this summer.

At the risk of flushing all of my critical cred right down the toilet, I will confess I don’t hate the first Cars. And Cars 2, while insane, is sort of fascinating in its madness. It’s not good, but I have watched it more than once. On the advice of my attorney, I will not comment on my physical or emotional impairment at the time of these screenings.