Everything We Know About Cars 3
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GameSpot recently attended an event at Pixar Animation Studios in California where we were shown the first 40 minutes of the upcoming Cars 3. We talked to the directors, animators, and designers to find out as much as we could about the upcoming movie, as well as to try and find out exactly what challenges face Lightning McQueen this time around. Cars 3 opens in theaters on June 16, 2017.
Warning: Minor spoilers follow.
Meet Lightning McQueen's new rival
Just as Lightning McQueen was s young and hungry racer in the original Cars, a new challenger has arrived in Cars 3 to vie for the Piston Cup. His name is Jackson Storm, and he's a high-tech racing machine that, at least initially, leaves an older car like McQueen in the dust.
Pixar character production designer Jay Shuster said Storm was specifically designed to make McQueen look outdated. "Storm is a weapon on wheels, so we want all his lines to be super aggressive, creased and stealthy," Shuster said. "We wanted Storm's graphics to be different. His graphics had to be bold and as elegant as possible. Storm's character actually had to read through to his graphic design. Like McQueen has his iconic lightning bolt, we wanted Storm to have his own icon. We took the international symbol for a hurricane and transformed that into Storm's iconic S."
Storm, like McQueen was in the first film, is an arrogant character, and this comes across in how he moves and talks, according to directing animator Jude Brownbill. "The one thing that really helped us define Storm was just the contrast between what his eyes were saying and what his mouth was saying. There will be times in the movie where he will come to McQueen and say: 'Hey McQueen, how you doing? Hope you have a great race.' And he is smiling, and it sounds like he is being honest, but really his eyes are actually telling a different story. It just adds to that feeling of like, I'm not sure if you are a nice character or not. We tried to put that into Storm as much as we could."
About that big crash we see in the Cars 3 trailers...
During an intense race with Storm and other new cars, Lightning pushes himself harder than ever. Due his eagerness to win, he ends up in a serious accident that takes him out of the race. Despite the seriousness of his injuries, McQueen is determined to be the one that decides when he is finished being a racer.
And this struggle is the central one in Cars 3; how does a once successful athlete deal with the ravages of age? According to story supervisor Bob Peterson, there are plenty of parallels to be drawn between McQueen's story in Cars 3 and real-world sportspeople. "Any athlete as they get older, they just don't have the legs anymore. What do they do? Do they crumble, or do they try to rise up? In any endeavor of life that's the case. You have people that are either nipping at your heels, or your own abilities fail you, or whatever. And you have a choice to make of whether to crumble or endeavor."
The new management at Rust-eze
With new determination, McQueen declares this will be his best racing season yet. He heads over to Rusty and Dusty's training center to find they sold Rust-eze (who were McQueen's long-time sponsors). Sterling is the new owner. He's a big fan of McQueen's and has brought new high-tech equipment into the facility.
Sterling is supportive but also makes it clear he's running a business. He shows McQueen a huge pile of merchandise with the famous racer's image, and Sterling informs McQueen that merch could be his legacy. worried about the brand. If he doesn't win the big race in Florida, he's finished.
McQueen gets a personal trainer
After his crash, Lightning McQueen is forced to work with a trainer, Cruz Ramirez, who, much to McQueen's displeasure, treats him like he's an old car. Cruz is a very enthusiastic character, one who prefers to focus on racing simulations, treadmills, wind tunnels, and virtual reality. In other words, everything other than a race track.
Directing animator Jude Brownbill says a lot of Ramirez's on-screen personality was influenced by the comedian who voices her, Cristela Alonzo. "[Ramirez] is determined, smart, and funny, someone who comes from a modest beginning and is seeking success in an unconventional field. The animators went straight to the source and we started looking at Cristela Alonzo's TV show, her stand up clips. We went to watch her stand-up. We just tried to immerse ourselves with everything we could Cristela Alonzo just to really see if there were facial expressions or acting choices, or the comic timing that we could steal and put into the character of Ramirez."
McQueen enters a demolition derby and meets Miss Fritter
After a bit of "virtual" training with Ramirez, McQueen discovers a racing opportunity is close by at Thunderhollow. Covering himself in mud as a disguise, McQueen enters the race, which actually turns out to be a demolition derby. McQueen experiences the dangers of the event and faces off against the deadly Miss Fritter--a tricked-out school bus that shows no mercy.
This demolition derby will be one of the key action sequences in the film, and showcases one of the biggest technological hurdles the Pixar team had to overcome for the making of Cars 3: effects supervisor John Reisch said that figuring out how to show mud was the hardest thing the effects team had to contend with for the film. "Mud is one of those substances that, it's not really a liquid, it's not really a solid, it's kind of somewhere in-between. That sort of in-between state is something that's really hard to capture in the theater and simulate correctly. [In this sequence] the audience needs to understand that if you're not moving through this puddle of mud really fast you're going to get stuck, and there are consequences to that. You really don't want to be stuck there with Miss Fritter on the loose," Reisch said.
Ramirez secretly wanted to be... a racer
After the near disaster that was the demolition derby, McQueen takes out his frustration on Ramirez. It's in this scene where we find out a little more about Ramirez's backstory, including the fact that she dreamed of being a racer herself when she was younger, but never had the confidence to follow through on her aspirations.
According to the writers of Cars 3, that confidence gap that many young girls seem to experience was one of the key issues they wanted to explore with a character like Ramirez. "I started reading about confidence and the new evidence about girls being less confident and why that is. The confidence-gap, self limiting, and the phenomenon of showing up at try-outs or art class or whatever. Looking around and seeing everyone else's work and just going, 'I'm not good enough.' And walking away," Cars 3 writer Kiel Murray said. "So we were trying that out with Cruz as a potential way to go. [There's a scene] where she asks McQueen at the end of it: 'What was it like for you? How'd you know you could do it?' And he says: 'Well, I just never thought I couldn't.' We played that for women in the studio. A lot of the women, particularly in leadership positions, said that they felt that way. That they wished that they felt as confident as they should be in their position, and that they had this self-doubt that plagued them."