For director John Lasseter and the whiz kids at Pixar Animation Studios the process of personification is about more than associating emotion with objects.  In his latest film the Toy Story visionary takes time-out about halfway through for a quiet romantic breather between two characters perched on the edge of a cliff face.  There they stare with dropped jaws and busy eyes at the splendorous stretch of landscape ahead of them: a vast horizon of desert valleys and golden lowlands, picturesque and unscathed.  One remarks how in the old days passers-by used to explore the terrain rather than drive around it.  The other says it’s about the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.  It’s a sugary sentimental moment, that’s for sure, but it’s also genuine and prepossessing. 

These characters are, by the way, not human.  They’re a Porsche named Sally and a race car named Lightning McQueen, and they live in a world inhabited by cars.  The scene probably should have been a weirdly oxymoronic sensory experience, like watching a circus clown deliver a eulogy or listening to John So lecture about English phonetics. 

“If the world was actually owned by cars,” a friend of mine remarked shortly after a child-infested Sunday morning screening, “I wonder how long it would take before all the pollution they made really fucked it up.”  True enough, although that grim logic barely registers a blip on the radar.  It is a testament to Lasseter’s disbelief-suspending powers and the completeness of his vision that he can convincingly pull off a dramatic moment involving two petrol-fuelled cars discussing the virtues of a natural existence.  And if that you think that’s weird, wait until you see the film's idea of a motorized cow.

Owen Wilson lends his boyish all-American syllables to Lighting McQueen, the dashing vanity-stricken racing superstar whose ego and hubris will be humbled by an atavistic community of cars populating a ghost town he invariably stumbles upon.  On his way to the Piston Cup Championship in California - the Numero Uno circuit for big-time wins and lucrative sponsorships – McQueen upsets the fuzz (Sheriff – voice of Michael Wallis) of Radiator Springs, a sleepy town off Route 66, and is promptly fitted with a tire clamp and sentenced to community work.  Naturally he strenuously objects but gradually finds a soft spot for the town and its offbeat residents: primarily ex-big city dreamer Sally (Bonnie Hunt), doofus tow truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) and jaded town patriarch Doc Hudson (Paul Newman).  Thanks to a casting decision bound to outrage fans of Cheech and Chong Cheech Marin provides the voice of a ’59 Chevy low-rider while the hippy stoner van character goes to somebody else.

Silky smooth CGI surfaces demonstrate the genre at its cutting edge, but the film’s screenplay (for which at least a handful of writers contributed to) distances itself from overloading on novelty value.  McQueen’s moral passage to a more dignified lifestyle rehashes a familiar shtick - essentially an obvious but obliging spin on the small town/big city juxtaposition.  It is an unusually humane conceptual basis for a movie starring talking cars, but the scope and strata of Lasseter’s universes are after all still very much our own. 

Just as Toy Story never strayed too far away from a child’s bedroom, Cars doesn't swap Earth for a more convenient mechanical location.  The characters are still human, essentially, albeit humans that have taken the form of their own invention - in Lasseter’s case, inventions closely associated the props and elements of childhood whimsy. 

That's personification, and then some.