Yahoo Autos Pixar's Cars 3 Pits an Entitled Millennial Against Lightning McQueen
It's hard to believe that Disney/Pixar's original Cars movie debuted all the way back in 2006. In the computer-animated universe were the cars are the drivers, Nascar-inspired racer Lightning McQueen has gotten a decade older since we first met him.
And according to an in-depth report from Entertainment Weekly, age will play a big part in the plot of Cars 3.
WARNING: Some very general plot points will be divulged ahead. If you want to go in to Cars 3 with nothing spoiled, perhaps you should go read something else.
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This age-based plotline was hinted at in the very first Cars 3 trailer that debuted in November-a slightly harrowing teaser that seems to show Lightning McQueen getting into a hell of a wreck. As director Brian Fee told Entertainment Weekly, the third Cars movie finds the hero, voiced by Owen Wilson, facing his own mortality.
"McQueen is not the young hotshot anymore, the kid he was back then in Cars 1," says Fee. "He's in the middle of his life, and as an athlete, that's getting up there. You have your whole life ahead of you, yet your career is starting to show its age. He's looking in the mirror and realizing, 'I'm 40 years old,' and dealing with the fact that the thing that you love more than anything else, you might not be able to do forever."
The competition isn't helping McQueen's confidence crisis, as best portrayed by his fiercest new competitor-the young hotshot Jackson Storm, voiced by Armie Hammer, perhaps best known for his role as the pompous Winklevoss twins in 2010's The Social Network.
"Jackson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth," Fee tells Entertainment Weekly. "Everything comes easy to him, and everything about him says he's faster, so much so that we've designed him so that even when he's standing next to McQueen, McQueen looks old."
To hear Fee explain it, Jackson represents the worst traits of the entitled millennial. ""He thinks the world is his. He's taking over. He's owed it," says Fee. "[T]he older guys had their day, and it's done, and they have no place in the future of racing."
It all sounds like the kind of movie that will have adults in the audience nodding along, despite the fact that it's supposedly "just for kids." But Pixar's magic has always been in creating works that appeal to all generations, tucking in plotlines and side-references to keep adults engaged along with their kids. Fee calls the upcoming installment "the most human" of the three Cars movies, and given what we know so far, we believe it.
To learn more about the movie, which debuts in theaters on June 16th, 2017, and to get an exclusive look at two new car characters, head over to Entertainment Weekly.
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