Revved up

The short answer is: Pixar does it again.

Admittedly, some of us had doubts about ``Cars." Maybe I fetishized my Hot Wheels when I was 6, but never to the point of projecting cartoon eyes and rubbery lips onto them, or having them -- ick -- fall in love. Everything about this project, from the NASCAR tie-ins to the relentless cross-marketing deals (does a computer-animated kids movie really make you want to buy insurance?) sounded like Pixar was dancing close to the flames.

Trust in John Lasseter, the company founder and sooper-geenius who's sitting in the director's chair for the first time since ``Toy Story 2." The man's a class act. For one thing, the marketing for ``Cars" is all on the outside -- there isn't one bit of product placement in the entire movie (hear that, DreamWorks?).

For another, the vroo m-vroom world of professional auto racing is established at the beginning and indulged at the end, but in the vast middle stretch, ``Cars" graciously takes the road less traveled. Yes, the pace sometimes gets poky, as though Lasseter were stuck behind a pea-picker on a New Hampshire highway. Yes, the life lessons are doled out with a heavier hand than before. There are trade-offs when you hit the back roads.

The film's hero, Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), knows only the racetrack: a cocky cherry-red rookie coming off a winning year, he's such a purebred that he doesn't even have headlights. Unlike previous Pixar movies, ``Cars" has no interest in realism; there are no human beings to silence the toys or catch the fish or frighten the monsters. The film creates a toddler's universe of anthropomorphized vehicles ranging from the inspired (bovine tractors) to the disposably topical (Jay Leno voicing a talk-show host named Jay Limo, har har). This bothers some critics -- and it has to be said that this is the least visually elegant Pixar crew yet -- but it seemed perfectly reasonable to the small boy quivering with rapture three seats down from me.

Pride goeth before a blow out in the opening race for the Piston Cup, and the results are a three-way tie among Lightning, the aging track champion King (racing legend Richard Petty), and snide contender Hicks (Michael Keaton). A race-off is planned in California, but on the way there Lightning accidentally gets separated from his transport truck (named Mack and voiced by Pixar regular John Ratzenberger) and finds himself lost on Route 66.

He winds up in a desert ghost-town called Radiator Springs, where he manages to rip up the main drag and is sentenced by the locals to community-service road repair. For the first time you can feel a Pixar plot straining to pull itself together -- six credited writers may have something to do with that -- but once everybody's lined up at the starting gate, Lasseter gets down to what he knows best: smart, soulful character comedy.

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Lightning's pilgrim's progress is stamped from the kid-movie factory mold: He has to stop being a self-absorbed jerk, learn humility, and allow others into his life . ``Cars" is less interested in the lesson than in the vehicles that carry it, though. Radiator Springs' village elder, Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), is a sleek 1950s coupe with an air of weary aplomb and a few secrets in his garage; his opposite number is a dim - bulb tow truck named Tow Mater, voiced with engaging Jim Varney-style brio by -- who knew he had it in him? -- Larry the Cable Guy.

There's a hippie burn out VW bus (George Carlin) and a drill-sergeant Jeep (Paul Dooley), a Hispanic low rider (Cheech Marin) and a home-girl show car (Jenifer Lewis), a pair of nattery, Ferrari-obsessed Italian jobs (Tony Shalhoub and Guido Quaroni). There's also the film's love interest, a light-blue Porsche Carrera named Sally whom actress Bonnie Hunt keeps just this side of cutesy-poo. (Still, when she and the hero started rubbing bumpers, the 6 -year-old in me experienced a profound desire to go out for more popcorn. The adult in me just wondered how far auto-eroticism can go before the R rating kicks in.)

This ethnic typecasting -- call it 'toon tokenism -- seems awfully schematic by Pixar standards, and elsewhere you feel the calculation with which ``Cars" cozies up to the heartland demographic. The country-rock soundtrack is too pushy, the action montages too strident, the celebration of fossil-fuel consumption a mite out of step with the cultural moment. This isn't Pixar's most organic work or its best (that honor goes to ``Monsters Inc." or ``Toy Story 2," both of which get a hilarious shout-out in the final minutes ).

Yet the movie wins you over through crack comic timing and an awareness that the point of driving isn't how fast you get there but what you see on the way. Irony of ironies, ``Cars" is an anti-racing movie, and it insists that life doesn't happen unless you get off the highway and slow down. This graceful second-gear spirit -- a knowledge that you sometimes have to turn right to go left -- permeates the entire film, all the way to an unexpectedly moving finale and end credits that list the mom-and-pop diners the filmmakers visited for inspiration.

Throughout, you're reminded of why a Pixar film makes the competition (including partner Disney) look hollow and craven. The dialogue and characterizations go the extra mile, and the throwaway details -- down to fly-tracks on a dusty window -- are warmly clever instead of glib. ``Cars" avoids the easy laughs of fart-exhaust jokes and hews to the time-honored classicism of Looney Tunes cause-and-effect. It knows, too, to stop occasionally and let us admire a beautiful image: the cone of a train's headlight as it crosses the desert floor, or the way a town's neon signs shut down until it seems the loneliest spot on earth.

That these scenes spring from the inside of a computer still seems a source of wonder to Lasseter and company, rather than a cash cow to be milked dry. ``Cars" has the body of a new machine , but its strength is that it's a toy story at heart.