I was not expecting this to be this mature, one of Pixar's best opening 15 minutes that sets up the surprisingly compelling comeback story for Lightning. The Cars movies were not really my cup of tea and I'm of the belief that the second one is actually better than the first because of it's utterly ludicrous nature. But, to this movies credit, the racing scenes are gorgeous especially the training sequences. I think the design of the cars has always been pretty ugly, specifically the mouths, but here everything that doesn't have to do with the design of the cars is really fantastic stuff that Pixar should be proud of. I was also surprised about the emotional angle of this movie and how it really snuck up on me, with an emphasis on Doc and how he influenced McQueen, more offscreen of course, the movie is able to balance it's main arc much better. Having not seen a Pixar movie in a while, the brisk pacing was certainly welcome and the writers really did a great job mixing old footage from the first Cars in with "vintage" footage we'd never seen of Doc Hudson and such. It didn't bog down the story and actually added to the weight of it, I felt myself getting a bit emotional at a few points despite not having an emotional connection to the first movie. Finally, it was nice to see Doc and Lightning have a better relationship portrayed than the one they had in the first film, one of the reasons I never really connected to it was because I never felt that Doc actually liked Lightning.
Review of Cars 3
