Where to watch Cars (2006)

Trivia & production notes

• John Lasseter and Bob Pauley first discussed making an animated film about cars while carpooling during production of Toy Story in 1993, with Lasseter repeatedly telling Pauley, 'Cars, Bob. One of these days we're going to make a movie with cars.'
• Early script iterations called The Yellow Car centered on an electric car in a gas-guzzling world, inspired by The Ugly Duckling and sparked by the poor reception the Mini-El car received in Klubien's home country.
• John Lasseter's cross-country road trip with his wife and five sons in 2000 inspired the film's story, after which he consulted Route 66 historian Michael Wallis who led eleven Pixar animators on two research trips across the route in rented white Cadillacs.
• The film was originally titled Route 66 in 2001 before being changed to Cars to avoid confusion with the 1960s television series of the same name.
• Lightning McQueen's racing number was originally set as 57, referencing director John Lasseter's birth year, but was changed to 95 to honor Pixar's first feature film Toy Story from 1995.
• The animators placed car eyes on the windshield rather than in the headlights to create a more human perspective and separate the character design from typical cartoon cars, a decision that was facetiously criticized by automotive blog Jalopnik.
• Supervising animators developed unique movement styles for each car character based on its age and type, with older 1950s cars animated with loose, bouncy suspension while sports cars received tighter movements to match their real-world physics.
• The animation team created special eyelids and eyebrows for the windshields and used tire leaning and steering angles to convey hand gestures and emotional expressions on characters without traditional limbs.
• John Lasseter visited design studios at Detroit's Big Three automakers, particularly meeting with Ford's J Mays, to research how cars were actually designed before creating the film's characters.
• The production emphasized 'truth to materials,' ensuring steel looked heavy and weighty, glass felt transparent, and all car movements reflected the three to four thousand pound mass actual vehicles carry.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Cars (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.