Route 66 is the road the Dust Bowlers took. During World War II, it was used as a military road by the GIs. It’s the road of Bobby Troup and Elvis. It’s the road our fathers, mothers, and grandparents traveled. Everybody at some point in their life in this country, whether they know it or not, has touched that road. It really does have iconic status. It gives motorists an experience that they’re not going to get in the great coastal cities. They have to go out in the middle of that juicy pie and taste it; not just nibble the crust…and really indeed life begins at the off-ramp,” concludes Wallis, who co-authored the book The Art of Cars with his wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis.
CARS represents one of Pixar’s most challenging and ambitious efforts to date. The studio has successfully and convincingly brought moviegoers into the world of toys, bugs, monsters, fish, and superheroes, but creating a believable and true world inhabited solely by cars was a whole other matter.
Lasseter’s mandate to have the car characters look as real as possible posed some daunting new challenges for Pixar’s technical team. Having a film where the characters are metallic and heavily contoured meant coming up with resourceful ways to accurately show reflections. CARS is the first Pixar film to use “ray tracing,” a technique which allows the car stars to credibly reflect their environments.
The addition of reflections in practically every shot of the film added tremendous render time to the project. The average time to render a single frame of film for CARS was 17 hours. Even with a sophisticated network of 3,000 computers, and state-of-the-art lightning-fast processors that operate up to four times faster than they did on “The Incredibles,” it still took many days to render a single second of finished film.
Lasseter also insisted on “truth to materials” and instructed the animation team not to stretch or squash the cars in ways that would be inconsistent with their heavy metal frames. The animators did a lot of “road testing” to get the characters to behave in a believable and entertaining way and found ways to add subtle bends and gestures that were true to their construction. The animators also discovered how to use the tires almost as hands to help the cars with their performance.
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