That's my problem with it as well. The first half hour is amazing and features this super-nuanced relationship where Merida fails to recognize the value of her mother's experience or see the big picture, and Elinor fails to recognize that tradition doesn't necessarily make something right.

Maybe I just missed it, but I wish that first scene had taken literally one second to include a clear shot of someone turning off the gorram webcam.

A wizard did it.

The Borderline Nihilistic Dinosaur

The windshields are their eyes and I'm fairly certain that all their side windows are tinted, so you never see what's inside them. But I mean, they're cars. And most things that we see them using are operated by pedals on the ground that they can press with their tires.

'Cause merchandise is the last thing on your mind when you're making a film where all your main characters are literally toys, right?

Except that, again, both Pixar and Disney share a single CCO at this point, and that man is John Lasseter, probably the single biggest supporter of the Cars franchise in existence.

Let's give the Cars movies subtitles!

Also true. But what stands out to me is that Ralph and Frozen were released back-to-back, and both have been granted official, DAS rather than DisneyToon, sequels.

Word on the street is that, even though Star Wars Land remains almost two years away, we'll be back to a fully functioning Disneyland by August!

I mean, let's not go crazy. The best Cars movie is better than 90% of live-action blockbusters.

YEAH!

The story's even cooler than that. Disney requested a direct-to-video sequel, but the Pixar folks decided that they'd rather try making something of theatrical quality in a similar timeframe. And they did.

I think it has a common prequel problem of establishing character histories that no one in the original film actually talks about.

It helps that it was their only second movie, so all it had to do was be in the same ballpark as Toy Story, quality-wise (and I think it certainly is, even if it's a little less focused in its narrative).

John Lasseter, who is the CCO of both Disney and Pixar at this point, personally led the charge on all three Cars movies. So…

An interesting wrinkle is the fact that Disney has announced more 'official' sequels - and invested more company resources into creating them - in the time since Lasseter took over than they had in their entire 70-year history beforehand.

I don't know what that means.

A kid [that we don't know] was killed [by someone we don't know] after Harry Dean Stanton had a vision [that we didn't see], three women [that we don't know] were murdered [by a dwarf that we don't know, for reasons that we don't know], Dougie uncovered an insurance scam [by scribbling vacantly on contracts], DIANE…

Part of me wants to stop watching, come back in a month, and hope that something has actually happened by that point.