Flight Improvement: PLANES: FIRE & RESCUE

A professional racer is told by his doctor to take it easy. Looking to put his new free time to good use, he agrees to help his tiny hometown by leaving home and getting his fire rescue certification. He ends up spending the summer at a mountaintop resort, finding new firefighter friends and getting his training in while helping them prep for forest fire season. It’s a sweet, simple, predictable little story with safe, easy lessons about being selfless, helping others while being true to yourself and other gently affirming stuff. I sort of enjoyed it, at least whenever I could half-forget that all of the characters were planes.

This is Planes: Fire & Rescue, a sequel to last year’s Planes, a spin-off of Pixar’s Cars movies. That pretty dumb and awfully flimsy movie was produced by DisneyToon, Disney’s direct-to-video arm, but got promoted to a theatrical release, presumably because someone at the studio thought it was good enough to do so. Or maybe there was a blank spot on the schedule that had to be filled quickly and cheaply. Either way, there it was, a bland regurgitation of Cars plot points and cheaply animated pap. Families bought tickets. Now it’s eleven months later and we have a sequel.

Maybe because director Roberts Gannaway and screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard knew they were aiming for the big screen from the beginning, the movie has a wider scope, rather lovely and detailed backgrounds, and that aforementioned predictable-but-likable story. The forest is lush and leafy, fires ripping through with convincingly rendered snap and flicker bleeding ominous reds and oranges through the picturesque greens and browns of the secluded resort area. The story about a group of professionals taking a newbie under their wing and teaching him the ropes is made up of stock parts, but plays reasonably well. The problem, and it’s kind of a big one, is the planes.

I liked the Cars movies. They had a certain charm and moved fast enough to outrace logical questions about how a world in which all living things are vehicles operates in any way. Sure, I idly wondered about questions like, “where do baby cars come from?” But the movies moved quickly, had Pixar’s trademark visual wit and emotional intelligence, and just plain knew not to steer the plot directly into areas that would immediately confront the core nonsense of the fantasy world’s workings. Not so Planes, which operated at a cheaper, thinner level, but worst of all foregrounded the nonsense. That’s a pattern that continues with Fire & Rescue.

It’s a movie that spends more time than necessary (that is to say, any at all) focusing on the planes’ bodies. A major plot point is a plane who is told he has a failing gearbox that can’t be replaced because “the factory discontinued the parts.” What!? You mean to tell me in this world of anthropomorphized vehicles there is a factory that can declare a death sentence for a whole type of being (species? product line?) by declaring them obsolete?  How horrible! At one point the camera zooms into the plane’s inner workings and watches as gears turn and spark. I don’t want to think about this! Throughout we get cutaways to dashboard gauges and knobs. Why are they there? Who is looking at them?

The movie’s obsession with the planes’ mechanical processes reveals only the failure to imagine the fictional world in any detail beyond the surface jokiness. It’s simply unworkable. What does work on some modestly engaging level is the story, which would be a humble charmer if someone were to rewrite it to star human beings. Whenever I could forget that Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) and his new firefighting pals (voices of Ed Harris, Julie Bowen, Curtis Armstrong, Wes Studi, Regina King, and more) were planes, it has a mildly diverting kid-friendly flow. The fire and rescue of the title is treated seriously enough to come with a dedication to real firefighters. That’s nice. So is the crackling danger that the planes fly through in visually appealing ways.

What’s not so nice are the nagging implausibilities and backfiring wit. I don’t want to think about a small-town bar named “Honkers” where a hybrid rebuffs a pickup truck’s pick-up line. Or an elderly fire truck voiced by Hal Holbrook complaining about his “rusty, blistered bumper.” Or a pair of elderly RVs who over-share that they “wore down their [tire] treads on their honeymoon…with all that driving.” Or a helicopter who is a broad offensive Native American stereotype who speaks in a pantomime of Native sayings.

Why this simple little kids’ movie insists on playing around in its most distracting, baffling corners while poking along at a pace that makes sure we have plenty of time to ponder its nonsense is beyond me. It’s not even close to even the worst of either Cars, but at least it’s an improvement over its immediate predecessor. Fire & Rescue is totally watchable, with better animation, design, characters, and story, and with fewer lame jokes. It’s not so bad, pleasant enough, but fundamentally preposterous.

Stuck on the Runway: PLANES

I’ve never found the world of Pixar’s Cars movies to be all that difficult to believe. It’s Earth, but every living thing is a vehicle. Of course the level of realism is close to nonexistent, but you know what else isn’t real? Talking cars. There comes a point where you aren’t picking away at the plausibility of a fantasy world and you’re just simply resisting the premise. When people wonder, say, how cars managed to build a cathedral or why they’d need farms, well, there’s no good answer other than “they just do.” Those questions simply don’t bother me because the world of Cars and Cars 2 is nothing more than a moderately clever spin on ours that’s only use is as a backdrop for fast-paced sequences of comedy and excitement vividly brought to life through Pixar’s typically virtuosic attention to animated detail and terrific sound effects. That they aren’t deep Pixar doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable in their own right. They’re cartoony and operate within their own cracked world perfectly. I choose to believe in it because I find them fun enough to avoid nitpicky questions.

Planes, on the other hand, is the movie that people who don’t like the Cars movies think they are. It’s a junk heap of cliché and distractingly haphazard approach to keeping the fantasy world making some sort of consistent internal sense. If nothing else, I hope it’ll help some Cars haters realize that, at the very least, those movies aren’t this bad. Pixar has had bad buzz around their recent sequels and prequels, as if follow-ups are inherently uncreative. I don’t think that’s the case. Nor do I think that they’re forced to make movies they don’t want to make. Proof is Planes, which is a spinoff of the Cars movies that was punted to their corporate sibling Disney Animation to cook up as a direct-to-DVD release. For some reason this on-the-cheap piece of rote animated family filmmaking has been deemed worthy of the big screen. Maybe Disney had an opening on the schedule they needed filling or hoped that it could cushion the blow of the mega-budgeted The Lone Ranger should it flop. (It did, but don’t let that stop you from seeing it if you haven’t. It’s very good.)

Watching Planes had me questioning aspects of this universe I’d never contemplated before. It’s the story of a crop-duster (Dane Cook) who’d really like to be a racing plane. With the encouragement of a fuel truck (Brad Garrett), a forklift (Teri Hatcher), and a World War II (really) fighter plane (Stacy Keach), he enters an international globetrotting race filled with lazy cultural shorthand for contestants and destinations. The crop-duster is laughed at until he starts to make progress and win friends with his good heart. But isn’t this world one with a great deal of predetermination? If you’re born a crop-duster, don’t you have some mechanical limitations that could never be overcome? If you’re born a train, a popemobile, or a jumbo jet, isn’t your job pretty much set? Cars finds a racecar learning to enjoy life in the slow lane, while Cars 2 finds a tow truck mistaken for a secret agent. But neither advocates them doing things they’re just not built to do.

I realize it doesn’t make a good kid’s film moral to say that these vehicles are built to do certain jobs and should be happy with their lot in life, but isn’t that what’s happening here? To claim otherwise is to promote willful ignorance about the way life in car-land is built. This world has a pretty rigid caste system. Why else would a forklift (Sinbad) and the other racers (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Cleese, Priyanka Chopra, Cedric the Entertainer, Carlos Alazraqui, and Roger Craig Smith) relentlessly mock the crop-duster for his God-given technical specifications? So what happens when a vehicle goes into the shop? Is it major surgery to improve the engine block? How about getting outfitted with shiny new aerodynamic wings? Plastic surgery or performance enhancement? There’s a deeply strange moment when the crop-duster is worried about removing his sprayer to improve his speed.

If there had been anything distinctive or enjoyable about this movie I probably wouldn’t have been stuck contemplating the underlying philosophy and countless technical details of this fantasy world. I also found myself asking why this world even needs crops, let alone crop-dusters and, in the vehicular World War II, what type of car was Hitler? A shot of the New York City skyline had me briefly wonder what happened in this world on 9/11. I realize these aren’t questions the target audience is likely to be asking, but I had to do something to keep my mind active. It’s not often a studio approves its own cheap knockoff, but here one is anyways. The animation is vanilla, the plotting achingly predictable and painfully simple, and the moralizing cheap, sentimental, and tone-deaf. (The only mildly enjoyable touch is the casting of Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer as Top Gun fighter jets.) Director Klay Hall and screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard (responsible for three direct-to-DVD Tinkerbell movies between the two of them) have made a movie that’s nothing more than a timewaster, a space-filler, and, worst-case scenario, a babysitter. Kids deserve better than this lame hunk of junk.